Do I need Strava Premium paid subscription if I now have Garmin LTE paid service?

I subscribe to Strava Premium for $7.99 really only for the Strava Beacon feature which sends a text link to my wife during my run that she can track. But if I now have paid for the Garmin LTE service, would I need Strava Premium still since Garmin LTE can also send a text message? Or can it only send an email? I am a bit confused! Thanks.

0 nord0296 over 3 years ago

I think the notification of LiveTrack for the 945 LTE is really the same as past products. The key difference is obviously that you do not need your phone to start it and continue to send your data to Garmin's cloud (and thus LiveTrack watchers).

Ironically the Live Event Sharing option sends text messages vs e-mail and may be manipulated to roughly achieve your goal (live track with sms notification instead of e-mail).

I haven't tried this, but I believe you could set the live event share options as such:

Live Event Sharing -> ON
Recipients -> Your desired SMS recipients

Message Options / Message Content:

Cumulative Time -> OFF
Pace or Speed -> OFF
Last Lap -> OFF
Estimated Completion Time -> OFF

Message Options / Message Triggers:

Start -> Checked
Transitions -> un-checked
End -> un-checked

During Event:

Unfortunately it seems you can't turn all of these off (to avoid additional txt messages during your activity). I'd suggest setting it by Time or Distance only and setting the values to be higher than your anticipated total Time or Distance (thus not sending any messages during your event.

I suspect this would also work with past devices that had Live Event Share and (still isn't specific to LTE), but I'm struggling to recall what devices that would be without looking.

The key here, of course, would be that the Start message would be sent and include a Live Track link in it. The following messages are all basically disabled due to turning off to many settings.

If anyone gives it a try I'd be curious if it works to achieve the goal: Live Track with SMS notification vs e-mail

0 MrJakey over 3 years ago in reply to nord0296

Thank you for this detailed response - I tried what you said, but regarding the "During Event" messages, if you set by distance and put in a value that is much higher that you won't reach, it keeps coming back to 5 miles. So looks like the highest you can go is 5 miles. Based on time also limits you to 30 minutes! How come you didn't check "End" for messages for the event? Surely Garmin can help here?! Garmin-Dan

0 nord0296 over 3 years ago in reply to MrJakey

I didn't check End merely because I assumed you wanted a single start notification sent by SMS with a LiveTrack link in it.

You could definitely check "End" and have a second notice send when you end the activity... similarly you could turn on various message fields and transmission during the activity as desired.

I didn't realize the limits of the during activity alerts, sorry for not flushing those out more before suggesting :)