Have you also found the OHR completely useless with 18.X/ 19.X/ 20.X?

As all the others, I have found the 255 Heart Rate accuracy to be terrible in comparison to my FR245. This is on firmware 17.?? and 18.22/23. Continuously fails to track heart rate during indoor cycling (compared to arm optical HRM and chest strap HRM). Most times it takes ages to go from resting HR to zone 2-3, then eventually gets there but often drops to half or one third of this. Fails to track peak HR in race efforts, and usually drops to much lower than the HR that I know from experience and my other HRMs is correct. I'm very experienced with getting a good signal from my 245 (watch placement, band tightness). I've fair skin and non-hairy arms. The signal sometimes gets a bit better if I rotate the watch to the inside of my wrist, but not always. HR maybe a little bit more reliable when running, but it seems incredible with all their experience that Garmin can't get this fundamental thing right. Thinking of going back to my 245, very disappointed with the 255.

18.21 was the 1st time all winter i've had decent heart rate measurements. 18.22 and 18.23 were also great. Weather was cold today HR was all over the place. It's still running 18.23. There was also another update last week after 18.23 but the version number didn't change. Could just be a one off and unlikely to have too much cold weather again for months but i'm keeping an eye on this.

Hey guys, it's me again, this time with proof.

tl;dr: The OHR is working even worse than I thought. (current software version: 18.26)

I've now tested my newly purchased Garmin HRM-Dual a few times and can tell you that on the chest-strap side of life, the grass doesn't really grow any greener. Yes, my readings seem to be correct again, but the thing is really uncomfortable. You also have to let it soak up water to get any readings right from the start. Anyway, what's really strange is that apart from a brief notification that the belt is connected, there is no indication of whether it is actually sending the pulse to the watch or not, as the watch's OHR remains on at any time. There is no icon in the watch display, nothing.

I have read that this has to do with functions that Garmin wants to introduce. The public beta version 19.09 change log says: "Adds heart rate dynamic source switching to select the best heart rate data source (watch or chest HRM) to improve accuracy during running activities."

The fact that both sensors record gave me the opportunity to compare the OHR and the chest-strap data. I downloaded the *.fit file from Garmin Connect Website, read out the raw data with Golden Cheetha and processed it in Excel.

The graph shows my sprint training today: 15 minutes warm-up, 7x 20 seconds sprint with 3 minute walking and finally 20 minutes cool-down. In my opinion, it's a bad joke what the OHR has recorded. Somehow it "follows" the correct heart rate, but not really. At minute 24, it looks as if it has picked up the correct heart rate, but still completely ignores the 4 x 20 second sprints in zone 5 afterwards. All in all, the tracking would be completely worthless again today without the chest strap.

What does "select the best heart rate data source" mean for the future of chest-strap users? Will the watch then decide that my sprint training today was a low effort basic run with a maximum heart rate of arround 145 bpm because the pulse peaks seem suspicious? Will the incorrect and way to low heart rate be inserted when the chest-strap would have slipped during sprinting? With the best will in the world, I can't understand why another source of error is being slapped on top of this whole mess.

It's starting to "annoy" me that a manufacturer like Garmin can make its devices practically useless with a bad software update and still pretend there's no problem.

Finally, I would like to emphasize that I don't want to equate a chest-strap with an OHR, but there was a time when my expensive Forerunner recognized that I was doing an anaerobic sprint training and not a basic-run.

I think I'll keep posting my poor readings here for fun until the OHR is working properly again. This time something easy for the OHR: threshold running. Another workout of the other day suggested by Garmin, so someone must have thought that the watch was suitable for this.
It is very good that the watch recognizes my correct heart rate at minute 2, as this is an indication that I may be wearing the watch correctly after all. Unfortunately, it loses the correct signal shortly afterwards and only correctly records the second half of the first block at threshold heart rate. In the second block, even the total of 8 minutes at the threshold heart rate is not enough for the watch to recognize the correct heart rate, which is actually 20 beats higher.

Hey folks, is the OHR still that bad or has Garmin actually improved something?

I have deactivated the OHS while running since the function was integrated.

It remains WHR: 16.01.02 in the last updates, hence it was no changes made.

Garmin has driven itself (or us?) into a corner. If I understand correctly, they have standardized/united the WHR module SW for the last and second-to-last generations. This means that every change affects all models from fr55 to f8. The optimizations will be only made to improve the last generation, not older ones.

So, in short - there will be no fix for frX55 devices because simply using old, working software is not an option.
I would be happy to be wrong, but...

strange to read that FRx55/x65 was aligned to Fenix 7 Series and here is the WHR version

With 19.xx - Beta

• WHR : 18.01.04

With 18.xx (Released in parallel to 20.xx for FR)

• WHR : 17.00.09

With 17.xx (sync with N-1 for FR)

• WHR : 16.01.02

With 16.xx (sync with N-2 for FR)

• WHR : 15.05.00

I found another post and 20.xx is aligned to F7 Series and WHR is 17.00.09 with 20.32.

Exact same problem here.