Bluetooth failure during Full Frontal

After a week of following the prep plan, Saturday was my first Full Frontal of the season. All was going reasonably well, completed 5s and 5min sessions with no issues. 3 or 4 minutes into the 20min effort, Bluetooth disconnected on all 3 devices (Kickr Snap, Wahoo cadence and HRM). I hoped it would be a brief drop-out, but just wouldn’t reconnect. So, session over and my first ‘we need to talk’ email.

After lots of thought, the only thing I can think that I did differently was downloading in advance. I have a 200mbps connection directly to my windows laptop, so have never really bothered about downloading. I have had a few short video issues in the past, so have recently started to download. My question is, for my next attempt, would I be better just running it without downloading? Could downloading somehow have caused the issue? I’ve never had a complete drop-out occur before, and it’s been fine since. Any advice welcome.

I feel your pain, (I almost said suffering), been there before. I believe my worst Bluetooth drop happened during a Monty (I think that’s the old name for the ramp test).

For what it’s worth, the Bluetooth connection on my 2019 HP PC with the latest windows 10 upgrades had intermittent Bluetooth connection problems with Sufferfest and would drop my trainer and or heart rate, cadence, power sensors frequently.

I switched to ANT+ with a single extension that is about mid way under the bike and I no longer experienced those drops and glitches.

I’m not sure about the new SYSTM connections… I’m assuming they’re the same but I’ve not tried it.

Hmm, I gave up on ANT+ because it was too unreliable. Maybe I’ll see on another workout how it is now.

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I had some major connection issues to my smart trainer with Bluetooth over iOS. I normally use my PC with and ANT+ set up but thought I’d try a different setup. Lot’s of ramping up power and ramp downs so it was like a roller coaster but not in a fun way. I’ll stick with the ANT+ for a while.

@Chico, are you using any other Bluetooth devices (e.g., headphones, speaker)? There have been some reports of conflicts and/or dropouts when using Bluetooth audio devices.

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@way9e0 not for FF. I have used Bluetooth headphones on other workouts with no issues.

@ Chico what Wi-Fi frequency are u using at your home? I noticed that 2.4GHz Wifi can affect bluetooth trainer connection. Unfortunately I still have some devices which are not 5GHz ready so I can not disable it completely. So I disable 2.4 each time for training time and it works smoothly. You could also try lowering Wi-Fi power if disabling is not an option.

@michalp I don’t have WiFi in my cave. I am 100% wired. Are you suggesting I should switch wi-fi off on the laptop?

@Chico you can try turning off 2.4GHz WiFi (leaving 5GHz only), lowering power or disabling WiFi completely. All this you need to do on your AP, not laptop.

@michalp, not sure how that would help. Wi-fi is not in range as I train in a shed. Hence the hard-wired solution.

I reached out to the minions who suggested uninstalling the SUF app, which I have now done. But fail to see how this would have caused the issue as it wasn’t running when I did FF. Confirmed by checking the last date used before uninstalling.