{"id":21182,"date":"2016-02-12T07:40:50","date_gmt":"2016-02-12T07:40:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.alananna.co.uk\/blog\/?p=21182"},"modified":"2016-02-12T07:51:27","modified_gmt":"2016-02-12T07:51:27","slug":"garmin-fenix-3-phantom-activities-fix","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.alananna.co.uk\/blog\/2016\/02\/garmin-fenix-3-phantom-activities-fix\/","title":{"rendered":"Garmin Fenix 3 Phantom Activities Fix"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Fenix<\/a>

Fenix 3 Phantom Activities<\/p><\/div>\n

Recent updates to the Garmin Fenix 3 seem to have introduced some annoying bugs for me and many others. One of the most annoying of these is the addition of loads of ‘phantom activities’ to Garmin connect, and therefore any other tracking services that use Garmin Connect as it’s source.<\/p>\n

For me, this manifests itself in lots of additional activities all with no distance added to Garmin Connect when my Fenix 3 syncs, and these activities then get pushed to other services such as Strava and my health tracking rewards programs<\/a>. For some reason they don’t seem to make their way to Training Peaks though. As you can imagine this is pretty annoying as I then have to manually go through each of these deleting the phantom activities.<\/p>\n

The Cause<\/h2>\n

Apparently the cause is actually an issue with Garmin Connect and not with the watch itself, even though it was an update to the Fenix 3 firmware that starts the problems. The firmware update is supposed to be OK, but the Garmin Connect software hasn’t been updated to reflect the changes made in the new firmware and that is the cause of the problems. Garmin Connect needs an update to catch up with the Fenix 3 updates.<\/p>\n

Fenix 3 Phantom Activities – The Solutions<\/h2>\n

There are a few solutions, none of which are ideal:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Revert to Firmware 6.50 – I’m not sure how to do this, but may look into it as 6.50 was working fine for me.<\/li>\n
  2. Switch off the Activity Tracker – I don’t want to do this as I like seeing my steps, I like getting rewarded for my steps<\/a> and I like tracking my sleep<\/a>. Switching off the activity tracking just turns off lots of the features of the watch<\/li>\n
  3. Turn off Move Alerts – This is a less extreme form of solution 2 and may just work for you. The Jury is still out for me. It seems to have helped, but I’m not convinced that it has completed eliminated all of the phantom activities.<\/li>\n
  4. Wait for a fix from Garmin – Who knows when this will be?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Option 3 is the one I’m trying at the moment. It works because it looks as though the phantom activities are coming from periods of ‘step activity’ being interpreted\u00a0as phantom activities. In some cases it might be the move alert (or the steps after a move alert) that are triggering this.<\/p>\n

    Other Issues<\/h2>\n

    There are a few other issues creeping in with this 6.80 firmware update as well. For some reason in Garmin Connect my device\u00a0isn’t always recognised as a Fenix 3. Sometimes it is recognised and I get a new little image of a Fenix 3 to prove it, other times it gets shown as ‘device unknown’ instead. Not really a problem, but not how it should be.<\/p>\n\n\t\t