Since beginning of this year, I own a Garmin Fitness watch. First, I purchased a Garmin Vivoactive 3 but I always glanced at the much more expensive Quatix 5 because of its longer battery life, the sailing features and namely the feature to show boat data on the watch. Apart from that, the touch screen of the Vivoactive 3 was always difficult to operate in wet conditions.
So, I sold my Vivoactive 3 on Ebay and bought a Quatix 5.
First of
all, a short word on having a fitness watch: For me personally this is
something that motivates me to do sports and I find it interesting to look at
and analyze my fitness-related data (so does Garmin I bet but data security in
this context is a different story – in the end all data is stored on Garmin
servers).
The watch
itself is sturdy and despite its size comfortable to wear. The long battery
life-time of roughly ten days in my case is a huge relief over the battery life
of the Vivoactive 3 which I had to charge roughly every fourth day. The watch
has roughly the same fitness functions as the Vivoactive 3 but is missing the circuit
training feature – I rather would like to use this but in the end can live without
it.
This week I
had a check-up at my doctors and was doing a cardio test: Heart beat frequency
displayed by the watch was exactly like the rate of my heart beat displayed by
the professional setup. So, this works nicely.
Now to the
sailing features:
The watch
has some sailing-related features that are only available to the Quatix (but I
guess principally they should work on the Fenix 5 as well). These are:
- Displays distance and burn-time to
start-line (which I seldomly use but works okay)
- Barometer with graph (which I use)
- Compass (sometimes helpful)
- Immediate access to MOB positioning
(which I HOPEFULLY use seldomly use but I find this very nice)
- Tracking (I use my chart plotter for
this)
- Tack assistant (have not used this
yet)
- Autopilot control (only works with a
Garmin setup and I have B&G)
- Control of the fusion audio system
(which I also don’t have)
But now to
the main reason for buying the watch in the first place: Displaying sensor
data. In short: What a disappointment!
Longer story:
I do not have a Garmin chart plotter that connects with the watch natively but a B&G setup. So, I had to buy the Garmin GNT10 wireless interface to connect to the watch via the so-called ANT-protocol. The watch connects immediately to the interface via the installable GNT-10 app but quite some of the data is displayed not at all or wrongly. This is especially bad as this affects the True Wind Data which you obviously need for race sailing. This is what I got:
|
Breviation
|
Description
|
Works?
|
|
AWA
|
Apparent
Wind Angle
|
Works
correctly
|
|
AWS
|
Apparent Wind Speed
|
Works correctly
|
|
Boat
SPD
|
Boat
speed
|
Works
correctly
|
|
COG
|
Course over ground
|
Works correctly
|
|
Depth
|
Depth
|
Does
not show any value
|
|
Dist
next
|
Distance to next
waypoint
|
Principally correct
but rounds to the nautical mile
|
|
Heading
OT
|
Heading
|
Wrong
values displayed
|
|
Sea
Temp
|
Sea temperature
|
I don’t have such a
sensor so I do not know
|
|
SOG
|
Speed
over ground
|
Works
correctly
|
|
TWA
|
True wind angle
|
Wrong values
displayed
|
|
TWS
|
True
wind speed
|
Wrong
values displayed
|
|
XTE
|
Cross Track Error
|
Works correctly
|
Obvious to
say, this makes the watch useless for ambitious regatta sailors in the current
state of the software (the version I had to use was 1.30)!
Overall
conclusion: I will keep the watch for its fitness features but sent back the
useless interface. In principle, Garmin has a very good product in place – but
why the main selling point of the watch is not supported for non-Garmin setups
(and thus 80% of the market) totally escapes me. Especially, because if Garmin
added a remote-autopilot feature that supports other autopilots apart from
Garmin’s, this would be a killer product!
But please
correct the wrongly displayed data first … this cannot be so difficult.
