Chris, Thank you for the advice. I tried the same thing this afternoon. I started by impairing existing devices then I set up the Viiiiva by pairing it to my ANT+ speed/cadence sensor and also to my iBike power meeter. Then I paired my V800 to the Viiiiva. It asked me for my wheel size and completed the pairing. At this point there was no indication that the hrm had paired. I then paired the ANT+ output to my Garmin 510 and I bike. I put the V800 in Bike mode and was concerned because it did not show my heart rate on the initial screen like it does with the H7. It just said GPS OK and bike OK. I decided to try riding anyway and pressed start.... And everything worked. HR, speed and cadence all registered on the V800.

In many ways it worked better than the H7 and BT speed/cadence sensor I was using before. The hr signal never dropped and the reported hr was always in a realistic range. With the h7 I would occasionally lose the signal and sometimes my HR was reported as way too high. Also with the JARV speed/cadence BT sensor, the V800 only recognized the speed sensor. With the Viiiiva, I got speed and cadence.

I do still have some concerns. I don't know why the Viiiiva can't be used only as an HRM. If I could do this then I wouldn't have to associate the belt with a single bike. Also it would be more usable if if showed the hr prior to the exercise starting.

That said... This is great progress and very cool. Thanks!

Mark

Chris,

Today I went for a 20.6 mile ride and had the same sensors feeding my Garmin 510 and my V800. The basics - ie distance and track were the same as you would expect. Two things were very different. Altitude change and calorie consumption. Besides the obvious answer - the V800 must be correct and who knows what the Garmin is doing :-) - do you have an explanation? The Garmin showed1506' of altitude gain and 893 calories consumed. The V800 shows 1183 calories burned.and here is an interesting one that I didn't see before I started the note... My V800 shows 1180' of altitude gain. Flow is showing 3854' - which is CLEARLY wrong. Just to confuse thing further, when my Garmin data was exported to Strava, it shows 1865' of climbing and 996 calories burned. I could pull the data off my iBike also and I expect that it would be still different.

I don't expect all the numbers to be dead on... but I would not have expected them to be this far off. Any thoughts on the cause? Are there any studies on accuracy?

Mark

Any chance that the webinar would be available for offline watching?

Hi Chris,

I have my V800 since a week now. Brilliant watch, truly, though I am still fighting with the many gaps left for the time being on the software side.

One absolutely key thing for me is to find a turnaround for the absence of export function on PolarFlow. My whole training history is on SportTracks and I simply cannot go without until you close this gap in September.

So, I have tried to setup a running app (iSmoothRun) on my iphone to record my workouts while playing music, and I also wear the V800 on my wrist. I can then export via email (so easy with this app) in tcx format. It gets the GPS from the iphone, which is a bit erratic sometimes, but I can still correct the overall distance afterwards, once I import onto Sporttracks. Not and ideal setup, but it can do the job for 3 months.

HRM recording however is a big issue. I can pair the H7 sensor ok to iSmoothRun on the iphone, but then I loose it on the V800. It is a matter of which device is activated first : first one seems to lock it for most of the session. Strangely, during two runs of about 10km each, I had HRM recording just fine on the iphone, and sporadic reading on the V800 (say 3 or 4 times a few seconds recording) for about 7 km. Then, for both runs, I started to get full HRM reading on the V800 without losing it on iSmoothRun. Weird.

I have read that the v800 was supposed to rebroadcast HRM via Bluetooth to other recording devices or apps. Is that function not yet activated ? Or is here any trick which I am missing ? Or do I have a faulty device ?

Your help would be much appreciated !

So sorry, I've been completely disconnected for the weekend.

The H7 transmits dual signals - Bluetooth Smart + 5kHz. If it's paired to your iPhone, the V800 should pick up the 5kHz side of things. What I suspect is happening is it gets caught on Bluetooth Smart since you have them both paired, and the V800 never disconnects, it just can't find the HR signal because it's reserved for iPhone. What I would do is try unpairing the H7 from the V800 completely, start the iPhone up and just *wait* 30 seconds or so when the V800 is in pre-training mode for it to find the 5kHz signal and stick to that.

Hope this helps!

Hi Chris,

Thanks a lot for the tip, it does helps a lot !

Your suggestion also triggered me to investigate a bit more. So, I found out that I had overlooked a "HR visible to other device" parameter in the heart rate settings. I have set this to parameter to "on", then powered up the iPhone app, which locked ok on the HRP sensor. Then I put the v800 in pre-training mode, and after say 30 sec it seems that I have stable and consistent reading on both iphone and v800. Just a quick static test, sitting still and wearing the HR belt, for 10 minutes. So, this might then have the same effect than your suggestion to fully unpair the H7 from the v800 ?

I will try it during a real workout and let you know if this is sustainable, or else revert to your tip.

However, could there be any hidden drawback to such a "dual device" setup for the H7, like an impact on the quality of R-R recording ?

I also have a side question re. average lap pace. When I start a workout in "free format" i.e. no pre-programmed stages but just autolap set to 1km, it seems that the V800 displays incorrectly the average lap pace. In fact, it always shows instead the average pace since the very start of the workout. When the 1km autolap beeps however, it will flash the right average, but only for a few seconds (lap summary). That is quite inconvenient, for the instantaneous pace is far too unstable to be used as a true guidance. Is this a bug, to be solved soon, or a voluntary design feature ?

Hey Chris,

my Polar V800 does not transmit my heartrate data of my runs from the watch to webservice or app. I have all the data on the v800, but when i transmit them, there are only the gps data and time transferred. No heartrate. Know why?

The problem only occurs, when I did a run session. All the other sports work fine and all data including heartrate is transmitted.

THX
Markus

i had that same thing happen on sunday after a ride. (i synced to my phone, but didn't see the HR or GPS Route). Whatever you do, don't delete the workout from the diary at polar.flow.com - it will delete it from your watch when you next sync. I was told to look in the "settings" on the diary, for the workout, under the HR section and make sure the HR is checked.

I may have had a conflict with my ant+ HR and the BT HR i was wearing during the ride, though. Why wear 2 HR monitors? just to play with it and see if it had different readings. They were the same, so no need to analyze that anymore.

There are changes in my recovery status once I did a polar flow sync through my computer. I have the latest firmware. Is there a different calculation that goes on website side than that of the watch's calculations?

More of a sales question than a technical question, but is there a planned upgrade path (eg, discount pricing) from the RCX5 to the V800?

I have done the test today with the first method, hoping that the "HR visible to other devices" parameter would work. Nope ... though it is indeed better. I got HRM reading on the V800 for the last 70% of the workout (instead of last 30% previously without this parameter on). The HRM reading and recording on the iphone is fine again, uniterrupted for the whole run. Oddly though, it seems that the average heart rate for the workout is correct on the V800, even if I had no HRM display for the first third of the workout. I have looked back at my previous runs, and the v800 average seems also right. That beats me ... I could understand that a locking conflict with Smart Bluetooth could impact the v800 but i) why only untill a point in time and then uninterrupted reading till the end of the run, and ii) why would the v800 average HRM be correct if nothing is displayed ?

This said, I will try your tip (unpairing the H7) during my next run and let you know.

Jef

Chris,

In addition to cycling (I have a couple of questions in to you and am awaiting your thoughts), I am also trying to use the V800 for swimming laps outdoors. GPS distance is off but I think that you expect that. Just to report... today I did 2000 yds (about 1.1 miles) and it recorded 1.4 miles. I am not able to get the V800 to register my heartrate reliably. I can get it to register initially but it loses it when I swim. This is true even though I have the belt so tight that almost all the elastic is stretched out. Any ideas?

Mark

Any news on v650?

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"Base training is bull shit" - desertdude

I read somewhere that the reason GPS for swimming is not officially supported is not only the accuracy issues, but also the fact that the GPS signal disrupts the heart rate transmission.
Can you check if HR works more reliably when you turn off GPS?

Maybe Chris can chime in on GPS+Heart rate. I can see how Polar could eventually fix/improve GPS accuracy with some clever algorithms, but I don't see how they would get around a possible issue in the two signals blocking each other via a firmware upgrade...

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if you can read this
YOU'RE DRAFTING!

Sorry I missed that!
- Calorie expenditure: We 100% stand behind our methods and algorithms - we've just done so much research and development around this (30 years worth), have been validated by third parties with published studies..etc.. We're normally considered a gold standard and what other devices are compared to.
- On the Altitude side: I can't really comment on how the other devices are calculating the data. We've done the testing, and confident things are good here - but I'd love to back any answer up with actual facts so I'm looking at this now and will get back to you.


We'll have an announcement coming in the upcoming weeks on the V650. But development is progressing and we're aiming at a September release.


It's not due to heart rate. The GPS algorithms just haven't been optimized for open water swimming yet. We're doing some work on this, and the firmware for open water swimming & indoor swimming metrics should be at the same time.

I actually just confirmed you'll have a firmware update Friday to resolve this.

Yikes! That is months behind, basically almost the end of road cycling season ugh....

---

"Base training is bull shit" - desertdude

Two questions:


How many people were fired over the asinine decision to exclude ant+?

Do you think that was enough, or should there have been more?

I'm not spending $500 on a product only so I can spend another $50+ on product that I have to use as a workaround. This is about the dumbest idea I've ever seen for a company. BTW, the BTLE powertap is an extra $200, so your watch now costs $700 to use with existing products, or your could have included an $8 chip and made the thing awesome.

Face palm.

That's great Chris! Thanks for following up on this.

Mark

Chris,

Thanks for the response. One thing though... I may not have been clear enough on my comments on Altitude. Two points. First... you have a bug. The web version of flow reports an altitude that is clearly wrong and very different from what is reported on the V800 and on my iPhone's Flow app. On a recent ride the V800 and the iPhone app both report 880' of climbing. For the same ride, the web version of Flow reports 2886' of climbing. I KNOW that 2886' is NOT right.

Second issue - really just an observation. On the exact same ride, my Garmin 510 reported 1115'. The Garmin connect web site has a feature called elevation correction. When I enable this it reports 958' of elevation gain. Strava - which got its data from my 510 - inexplicably is reporting 1383'. The observation is that on something which should just be a measurement (unlike calorie burn which is not an exact science), there seems to be a very wide discrepancy of results. Which is right? What technology does the V800 use to determine this and what is the accuracy supposed to be?

Mark

Hi Chris

I love my V800, BUT....

Seriously how can it take you so long to get on Android compatibility? Will you allow Beat to connect to the V800 as well?
I'm sure you have heard this over and over, but Android has significant marketshare. I really have to wonder why if would take half a year to migrate the code you utilized for the Iphone App to the Android one.

On a slightly more positive note, I do have to say, I have been impressed with watch, its functionality, its daily usability and the GPS. The only real gripe I have with its functionality is being able to start a workout below 10% of the battery life. Is this something you can address in the next update?

Thanks

Endo,

My two cents... first, it would certainly have been nice if the V800 could listen to ANT+ devices natively - as long as doing it didn't cause other issues. We don't know whether this would have been the case or not... it could have impacted size, or battery life or something else and that is why Polar chose not to do it. Or it could have just been a strategic decision by Polar. If it was the later, I agree with you that it was not the best decision. BUT, we all have the ability to "vote" by decided to buy it or not.

I decided to buy it despite some weaknesses. ANT+ was one. Current inability to export data to Strava is another. Steep price is a third. Everyone gets to make their own choice based on what is important to them. I am happy with my decision. It is a great device and has the promise of getting better as Polar continues to update its firmware. It is NOT perfect - I've reported a number of bugs and questions so far. But on balance it does a lot now and I'm confident that Polar will fix the issues. As for ANT+... I know that it is about $50, but the Viiiiva seems to work well. I wasn't hung up on the $50 because I know that I'll go through belts anyway as the elastic wears and having two at the same time will delay my having to purchase new strap for the H7.

Mark

Thanks.. got it.. I'll come back to this.

Completely understand.. We know Android has significant marketshare. Simply a priority list of updates/features, though Android support is definitely top 3.