I was on my 3rd Tickr HR strap that I only use for TR and was sick of them becoming unreliable after about 3-6 months.
Rather than getting a 4th one I went with the newer Garmin dual band HR strap because my old single channel Garmin Ant+ one has worked very reliably for many years with the Edge head unit.
I used the new one it for two workouts and it was great. Connected easily and the data was close to my watch readout (optical sensor).
Now I’m having the same issue as you all, it connects with 90% battery life but doesn’t show any HR data. Wet the strap, change the battery, unpair and repair the device from the phone/TR, nothing works.
As a test, I connected it to my Garmin Fenix watch (after failing to get it to work on the TR app) and it does show my HR through that sensor right away. So I know it works. I did not have it connected to the watch before because of the multiple connections issues I’ve read about. It’s frustrating and I don’t want to buy yet another HR strap.
Update: I was able to do a firmware update to the Garmin HR strap via connection to my Fenix watch and after it finished it has worked great since. Connected to both the Garmin watch and TR phone app at the same time too with no issues.
This post inspired me to go and work on the problem some more. I couldn’t upgrade the HR strap firmware because I don’t have a watch or any other Garmin device besides an Edge 500 (not BT) and a Tacx trainer (doesn’t count). Someone said on the Garmin forums that completely resetting the networking on their device worked. So… back up network settings on my phone (making sure HRM is not paired). Reset all network connections. Then re-connect to wifi and restore network connections.
Magic. I get HR via bluetooth on my Android phone again (via the TrainerRoad software). Which is good since Strava stripped ANT+ support some time back – it works now with Strava also.
