Fitbit Charge 6 - PM5 Heart Rate?

[yonderbob]

it's probably been discussed to death. I see general complaints about fitness watches and monitors not working with the PM5. Just hoped maybe someone had some info specific to the Fitbit Charge 6.

I just got mine this week and was hoping to connect to the HR on the PM5. Here are the symptoms: Choose "HR on device from Fitbit", Go to connect on the PM5. PM5 apparently recognizes the Charge 6 since the name of the device appears on the monitor. It says "Connecting". and it just sits... and sits... and sits... until I give up.

I'm running Ergdata at the same time on a Samsung phone... would that affect it?

It would be nice if C2 would make this feature a bit more robust... or just remove it if it doesn't work.

thanks
yb

[jamesg]

Maybe it depends how the watch knows what it's supposed to know: via electric or pressure impulses, or something else. So one of these has to present. Belts with PM certainly take some time, they can't warm up any sooner than we do: there has to be some sweat to read electric signals to the heart.

I use an oxymeter that seems to read pressure. It shows a pulse rate after a few seconds. The number corresponds to what I also see with a finger and a clock. But belt and PM show me even 240.

Maybe that's an alarm bell, telling me to stop or die.

[JaapvanE]

I just got mine this week and was hoping to connect to the HR on the PM5. Here are the symptoms: Choose "HR on device from Fitbit", Go to connect on the PM5. PM5 apparently recognizes the Charge 6 since the name of the device appears on the monitor. It says "Connecting". and it just sits... and sits... and sits... until I give up.

I'm running Ergdata at the same time on a Samsung phone... would that affect it?

The Fitbit uses a modified bluetooth connection instead of the BLE standard implementation. So Google/Fitbit messed up on their end, not C2. I am one of the developers of OpenRowingMonitor (an Open Source PM5), we don't work with the Fitbit either, as their Bluetooth implementation sucks and they are to blame. And as far as we are concerned, we won't change one bit for supporting them, as it is typically Google behaviour of them breaking standards and expecting the rest of the world to accomodate them anyway.

It would be nice if C2 would make this feature a bit more robust... or just remove it if it doesn't work.

C2 follows the ANT+ and BLE implementations well (as does ORM). Although C2 has some room for improvement (especially in reaquiring a lost HR belt) their implementation is actually pretty decent. I must say most HR belts work well via BLE and ANT+, and even ANT+ FE-C works reasonably well (some issues occur at the protocol level, which is Garmin's task to solve).

[yonderbob]

Thanks for the feedback. I figured the Google monster could also be the issue. Anyway, not a huge deal as it syncs with my Android phone just fine. Interesting that PM5 has no issues with an Android phone what with Google everything running on it and has no bluetooth issues with any other app on it...

[JaapvanE]

Thanks for the feedback. I figured the Google monster could also be the issue. Anyway, not a huge deal as it syncs with my Android phone just fine. Interesting that PM5 has no issues with an Android phone what with Google everything running on it and has no bluetooth issues with any other app on it...

When the PM5 communicates to ErgData, it only uses the BLE transport layer, which is hard to mess up as it required to go through certification. The application layer is the ErgData app, which is made by C2.

When you have a HR monitor, the application layer is made by Google/Fitbit but the recieving end on the PM5 is made by C2. I don't know how HR data is processed internally in an Android device. Could be the Android OS handles that as it is a pretty standard sensor for Google Health.

[Joebasscat]

Thanks for the feedback. I figured the Google monster could also be the issue. Anyway, not a huge deal as it syncs with my Android phone just fine. Interesting that PM5 has no issues with an Android phone what with Google everything running on it and has no bluetooth issues with any other app on it...

Hey Bob, don't worry about it anyway. The Fitbit device worn on your wrist is about worthless on the rower anyway. I wear a Fitbit device daily and believe the HR feedback at lower rates are pretty accurate. So resting HR and sleep data etc… Not bad. On the rower, forget about it. IF I was HR restricted and depended on the Fitbit device for accurate info on the rower I would likely not be typing this now. Any number of chest belts (Polar H10 for me) will serve you well. Bit of hassle maybe, but accurate.

[JaapvanE]

I wear a Fitbit device daily and believe the HR feedback at lower rates are pretty accurate. So resting HR and sleep data etc… Not bad. On the rower, forget about it. IF I was HR restricted and depended on the Fitbit device for accurate info on the rower I would likely not be typing this now. Any number of chest belts (Polar H10 for me) will serve you well. Bit of hassle maybe, but accurate.

As a Garmin user I have to agree with this. I used a Garmin Venu, and later a Garmin Epix, even they struggle a lot with acurate HR tracking. Similar experience: works fine at easy rows, but when you go all-out, HR goes missing. Bought a chest belt, no issues at all.

[yonderbob]

Thanks, everyone...

just figured if that feature is part of the price of admission, it oughta work. no sleep lost.

[LimitedTimeGamer]

Just an update, i bought a charge 6 recently, and it now works on the PM5, but i had to update the firmware first.

Try that, and see if it works for you!

[LaughingBelly]

Thank you LTG,
I was able to get my Charge6 to connect directly to the PM5 - all good!

[yonderbob]

just a follow up.

The Fitbit Charge 6 worked fine for a while on a newer PM5. Then a couple of weeks ago it went wonky. The watch itself displays a Heart with some lap mumbo jumbo on it and it vibrates almost constantly. Still shows the heart line on the logbook, but the watch goes from almost fully charged to dead in a matter of about 25 minutes. I've tried a delete and reinstall of the fitbit app, installed latest firmware update on PM5, rebooted the watch itself. rebooted the phone... Nothing works.

I kinda like the watch for monitoring other stuff like sleep patterns, etc. Guess i have to break down and buy a chest strap just for heart rate. any recommendations?

[Erik A]

I use the Garmin HRM Dual. seems to do the job. with regards to the fit bit range of watches these are pretty much the lower end of smart fitness devices. all i seem to hear on other forums (particularly Running Forums) is ditch them in favour of Garmin which seem to have a very good reputation and also far better battery life. personaly i use a Huawei and the battery is outstanding i get 2 weeks minimum even after 5 years.

[Tsnor]

HRV data is valuable. Make sure the belt you get has the granularity to provide HRV data.

I picked the Polar H10. Extremely accurate, used in a bunch of scientific studies. But it has real drawbacks. The belts wear out (you can replace just the belt). Battery is an odd size (2025 not 2032) and battery life is hit or miss. I've had 2025 batteries last 400 hours of actual use. I've had them fail in 2 weeks with less than 30 hours on the battery. Its not the batteries. The H10 sometimes will just decide to chew on its batteries. I now voltage test batteries on the way in and the way out - they start good and die or get killed. I always remove the module from the belt and store it separately. When the app says "LO" it will run longer, but the voltage is down and you get drops if you don't slot in a new battery. Battery is easy to change.

The polar beat app is good. You can use your phone as a bike computer. The equivalent garmin app won't do that (maybe to avoid eating into the garmin bike computer market).

If you have any old gymlink equipment then polar is the way to go. H9 or H10. They are the same silicon, H10 is allowed to have more precision and starts with a better belt.

If my H10 fails I likely will try one of the garmin belts. Erik A's pick (Garmin HRM Dual) is a good one.

For budget, any of the Coospo belts that support HRV would likely work well at less than 1/2 the price. Example the coospo h808s heart rate monitor claims HRV. I've never researched how accurate. Many Many of these devices will report phantom data if they loose sync -- flat HR data from rest period through next interval.

[Tsnor]

FWIW: The fitbit/google Bluetooth HR broadcast problem has been discussed on this forum before. The root cause is google's decision to encrypt heart rate data. Not everyone supports receiving encrypted data. C2 added support, so get to the latest firmware level on the charge6 and on your PM5 and it will connect. Next question is whether the data you get is any good.

DC Rainmaker does great watch/wearables reviews. He cross checks HR data, GPS data, etc and then publishes reviews. The prior gen Charge 5 had a problem with HR data and GPS data - when you tried to get both the watch choked. Here is cut/paste from his Charge 6 review https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2023/10/fit ... eview.html

".. Fitbit admitted this was a problem with the design of the Fitbit Charge 5 antenna design – and the solution would be to use your phone’s GPS instead (which the Charge 5 could do).

"Now, going into the Fitbit Charge 6 I was curious to see if they’d rectified that issue. During my media briefing calls, they noted that the antenna design was not changed. However, they also noted that workout heart rate performance was improved by “40%”, mainly due to machine learning algorithms. So – the question to answer became: Could the heart rate algorithms overcome the poor antenna design, allowing you to wear it loose enough for GPS to still work, yet heart rate be usable?"

Getting a belt is a good choice. Since your Charge 6 cannot connect to the belt you'll end up with two sets of data. The C2 log data with the belt's HR and the fitbit data from the fitbit wrist optical sensor. If you can do some short hard intervals it'll be interesting to see how close the charge6 can get to the belt. When I tried that with my fitbit charge 2 and charge 3 watches they were useless, but things have gotten better since then.

[yonderbob]

i'm such a goober...

first, thanks everyone for your replies and suggestions.

I have discovered that my problem is the old I.D.10.T. problem. after doing some more futzing around with the Charge6 I discovered that the indoor rowing exercise choice has a setting in it for Laps. Why? who knows... since when does indoor rowing involve laps? Somehow in my prior putzing with it I must have turned that setting on by mistake. turned it off and everything is working fine.

I realize that this is the low end of the fitness watch scale. but I'm a $100 rower, not a $300 rower. It actually seems pretty accurate as far as HRV goes when I check it against the cuff my Cardiologist gave me.

thanks again for the input. Maybe this will help some other goober with a Charge6!

bw