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Solid black heart with chest strap

Miky
5 days ago

Why sometimes I see a solid black heart when using chest strap instead of zone-coloured heart?

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  • 0 5 days ago in reply to nowster

    No, it happens sometimes during run. Instead of a red/green/blue/gray heart (depending on heart zones) it appears a solid black heart for 2-3 seconds...

  • 0 2 days ago
    Miky said:
    Why sometimes I see a solid black heart when using chest strap instead of zone-coloured heart?

    Some additional context would be helpful.

    Are you talking about the Heart Rate Gauge data field, which shows your current HR value in bpm and a colour-coded heart icon corresponding to the zone [*], or a similar field? Or are you talking about something else?

    [*] (grey for 0-1, blue for 2, green for 3, orange for 4, or red for 5)

    When you do see a black heart, what HR value is displayed? Is it a number or is it something like "--"?

    I did a little test where I disabled the wrist HR [while not connecting an external HR strap] and opened an activity with the HR Gauge data field. In this case, I see a black heart and "--" for the HR value, which indicates to me that the watch is not currently reading any HR value [i.e. HR is unavailable.]

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  • 0 2 days ago in reply to FlowState

    So as far as I can tell, it seems like the black heart icon generally means HR is unavailable, and you could confirm if that's what's happening for you by also checking whether the HR value is "--" when you see a black heart.

    If you're seeing a black heart icon with a valid HR value (i.e. a number), I can only speculate that it's a bug related to HR source switching (**), which uses the wrist HR as a fallback when Garmin deems the data from a compatible Garmin HR strap to be unreliable.

    (**) Garmin support article for HR source switching

    [2/2]

  • 0 1 day ago in reply to FlowState

    Yes, I see it in HR gauge and it shows a value, not "--"

  • 0 1 day ago in reply to Miky
    Miky said:
    Yes, I see it in HR gauge and it shows a value, not "--"

    Hmm could be a bug then. Perhaps it's an inadvertent indication that source switching is actually active at that time (i.e. the numerical value is coming from the wrist HR, but the zone is coming from strap, while the watch is disregarding the strap data.) While it might be nice for Garmin to indicate when source switching occurs, this is probably not the way to go about it. There are ways to determine that after the fact, anyway [*]

    If you're in the beta program, I encourage you to post a bug report in the beta forums, when the next beta comes out, if you're still seeing this behaviour.

    [*] if this happens to you again, try to take a note of the activity time, if you're able to. (It might help to assign a hot key to the Screenshot function, so you can screenshot the activity timer data field). After you sync your activity to Connect:

    1) Open Garmin Connect in a browser

    2) Navigate to your activity

    3) Click the gear in the upper right corner and select Export File

    4) Open the file in https://www.fitfileviewer.com

    5) Click on the chart icon

    6) On the chart, you should have the following three metrics available: heart rate (the activity heart rate), wrist heart rate, and external heart rate

    7) The chart will allow you to graph up to 2 metrics at a time. By graphing heart rate and external heart rate and looking for discrepancies, you should be able to tell if and when source switching kicked in. You can also graph heart rate and wrist heart rate to double check that the hr actually switched to the value from the wrist.

    It would be interesting to know if your black hr icon actually coincides with source switching kicking in.