265 HR vertical Jump after about 10 minutes

Rohan Arora, I am glad the strap works for you!

I've tried at least 4 different brands / types of straps, a couple of Garmins, a couple of Polars, a couple of off brands.  Regardless of what I did, pre-wetting, strap tension, strap position, washing post exercise I could only get them to perform well occasionally (when new) and they never performed well for more than a short period of time. When I got the FR245 the fist update Garmin pushed out screwed the HR sensor which read abnormally low after that. I returned the watch (it was a week old), got another FR245, turned off updates and then did a bunch of testing on chest strap vs. wrist sensor.

For average, they were both about the same, for instantaneous the chest strap won, for lack of drop outs, or to just to start reading silly values the wrist sensor won. For me the wrist strap was the better option and I frankly loved the freedom of not having the chest strap on.

For the chest strap, maybe it's body composition and sweat composition that make a difference, just guessing. For the wrist strap sensor it's got to be vein location relative to the sensor.

For both of them the software has to work and in concept that seems easy, the sensor sees a pulse, the software reads and reports it. How to you screw that up?

Garmin-Sierra Another treadmill run last night. This time just before dong the run, I powered down the watch and powered it back up. I did that thinking if there was some time of filtering going on, powering off and on might reset the filter. I still got an HR bump but it was about 6 1/2 minutes in (much sooner than previously) and the bump was about 10 BPM less, it jumped from 145 to 155 instead of starting at 135.

I have no idea if toggling the watch off/on played a part in that. Since you thought it was fixed in the latest release then you must have an idea what the base cause is. If you would be a little more forthcoming about what was fixed, maybe there is a reasonable work around without having to update and risk the recently reported loss of connectivity or accelerated battery drain issues.

Other than the funky HR jump, I'm so far happy with the watch, considering my explorations into the various functions have been pretty limited.

tbh i think their HR sensor is failing on a hardware basis else they would have found a solution to it by now if it had been a software issue. So many updates and still the sensor is not able to give an accurate read whether its an activity or even when you are resting. The nap function is another hiccup, if I sit idle for sometime, the watch considers it a nap, so its probably reading my HR as RHR at that time when I am doing nothing and considering it as sleep. This watch is just good for its gps accuracy and battery backup. Rest of it is just garbage. All those statistics, values, loads etc are useless if the HR sensor is giving faulty readings.

Rohan Arora Certainly no disagreement that the hardware has to work. So far for me the hardware has been solid and I've used a lot of different Garmins, auto, cycling and running. My cycling Garmins haven't been updated in more than a decade. The software in the running watches has been the problem for me.

Your hardware concerns did move me off center to do the tests in my other post about the 245 to 265 head to head comparison and from that it looks again like a software issue for my 265 (HR stats from starts at beginning or after stops). It's certainly not impossible you've got a hardware problem though, I would think especially if it's an issue that hasn't been logged in other forum posts.

I have never understood why some folks report things like excessive power drain after updates and others don't, and why the resolution can be watch resets / reboots for some but for others those actions don't solve the problems.That has always made me wonder about the consistency of the hardware production, i.e. is every 265 (or whichever) built with exactly the same hardware pieces with every component coming from exactly the same supplier?

I don't remember if you mentioned which software version you are on?  Or if you tried emailing Garmin Support?

I am on the latest one. Now I have more news for you, I just came back after a badminton session. I could feel my pulse to be way beyond 160 continuously as the games were pretty intense. My watch recorded my max HR as 129bpm!

I will post some more magic that I came across today while taking a shower. The watch thinks my water bucket is alive. It was showing a reading from 70-80bpm! So either my bucket is alive or I have a ghost fooling around in my washroom

I tested it on a tissue paper and suprisingly the watch showed 55-70bpm for more than 40-60 seconds!

That is not surprising, the watch is just reacting to your lights flickering slightly in the frequency of your electricity.