Open Water Swim performance

Exactly!  my 3 year old 735XT tracks my open water swims fairly well and a ton better than my 945LTE.  I am going to try a swim with the wifi completely turned off and 1 second recording instead of smart and see if those things help as some other forums have suggested. I really like having music and emergency LTE on the 945LTE because I run without my phone on some lonely roads......

Yes, one sec recording should help you. Unfortunately for me it is already set to that so in my case I there isnt much else I can try.  As it is, do get a reasonable track i now need to wear my watch on my right hand.  Never had these issues before. It does seem though that most dont have issues which must mean our swim is marginally different in such a way that the watch is either in the water too long or out of water less then the average user.

I would tend to take blame if not for 1) my 735XT reports nearly perfect open water swim, 2) the GPS swim route recorded by the 945LTE is spot on, its just the interpretation of what happened along the route that is off (ie it thinks I wasn't swimming).  On other hand the route recorded by the 945LTE on my 12 miles run this morning was accurate to a foot or two!  pretty impressive.

mark.yarvis said:

Does Livetrack over LTE work during open water swim?

I've done more swims with the watch and believe the answer to this is generally no.

I nearly always swim with a personal buoy and mostly have my phone in it (running Garmin Connect with a BLE connection).  When I swim in this way (with Live Track autostart enabled) I recall normally live track seeming to work - both with my old 935 and with the new 945 LTE.

I have since swam a few times without my phone on me, thus LTE should have taken over.  After swimming I realized I never saw a Live Track e-mail in my inbox later and presume it never started.

An aside, I also have noticed that my battery seems to drop rapidly when swimming.  I can't fully pin it on LTE, BLE, swimming in general, but 20-30 minute swims drop my battery by 10-15%.  It isn't every swim, but most of them.  My latest swim was 27 minutes long and lost 10%.  I know this isn't a really extended duration activity so accuracy is poor but I would have been assuming 1-5% for < 30 minutes.  I'm almost guessing LTE went into some kind of high power mode constantly trying to connect in this instance (no phone on me this time).

I could not get LiveTrack to work at all over LTE when I first got my 945LTE.  While I was chatting with Garmin Support, I initialized a manual emergency alert over LTE.  After 3-4 tries the emergency alert finally went through and then LiveTrack over LTE finally worked as well.  Perhaps there is some network initialization that has to take place or something.

I think for non swimming activities my live track over LTE works (or it has...).  I generally keep the auto start turned on, but randomly run with a phone and without.  I have it set to e-mail myself and my wife and am kind of used to deleting the e-mail after the fact that I can't always recall if there was a message or not.

I need to pay more attention, however, because I think it doesn't consistently and reliably work (even in normal Run w/ GPS situations).

Ironically after my swim yesterday I noticed my watchface showed LTE bars (after activity, maybe even 15 minutes later?).  I checked LTE status and it was connected... but I don't know why.  I forced LTE off and back on to get it into Standby, so some quirks here and there yet.

I'm on 3.05 beta...

I have a few new datapoints for this issue:

1.  My open water swims are consistently different between Garmin and Strava

   Recent example:

      https://connect.garmin.com/modern/activity/7064245302

      https://www.strava.com/activities/5569888551

   I have not had an open water swim that didn't differ dramatically.

2. Today I did a practice triathlon and found that while I normally don't see any issues with the run (not sure I've done an outdoor ride with this device), ALL of the segments of my multisport event had vastly incorrect distances!

   Garmin: https://connect.garmin.com/modern/activity/7108980531   (swim 858 yds, Bike, 12.48 miles, Run: 3.13 miles)

   Strava Swim: https://www.strava.com/activities/5612157586 (1254 yds)

   Strava Bike: https://www.strava.com/activities/5612157750 (3.18 miles)

   Strave Run: https://www.strava.com/activities/5612157656 (10.96 miles)

And, no, I didn't reverse the Bike and Swim.

3. Interestingly, although my watch and Garmin Connect both report the correct distances for each segment, both my watch and Garmin Connect reported new records for the run:

   1 mile: 0:00.8 min

   10k: 0:04.8 min

  So, while the distance calculation doesn't seem to be affected by the offset (assuming that's the issue), records are.

I'll be contacting Garmin support this week.

My experiences are all with the 2.10 firmware.

I spoke with customer support today and they said they will open an engineering ticket.  Not clear how long that will take to investigate.  It sounds like they are keenly interested in figuring out whether it's really a Garmin issue or a Strava issue.  To me, the crazy PRs suggest there is at least some Garmin issue.  We'll see what they come up with.

it looks like the 3.07 firmware is rolling out right now, as well as a new sensor hub.  Perhaps I can get better results from that.

Did a tri event over the weekend, and actually got the correct results.  Data on watch, on Garmin Connect, and on Strava, all looked correct.

This may be due to 

1. Watch updated to latest firmware

2. Didn't have to tread water or side stroke during activity, waiting for my daughter to catch up

3. I didn't use a foot pod during the run

Or perhaps Strava made a change?

Anyway, a good result, finally.  Just not sure why.