Poor performance heart beat monitor Suunto 5

[NL-Paul]

Hi there, I bought a Suunto 5 with a build in heart monitor (with the latest update), a couple of weeks ago. This heartbeat monitor is very unreliable!. My previous watch was the Ambit 3 with a separate heartbeat monitor. When I compare both watches on the same MTB track I have an average heartbeat rate of approx 145 for the Ambit and 75 on the Suunto 5!?. I followed the advise from Suunto and tried serval other things (not too tight, higher up the wrist, the other arm etc) without succes. And occasionally it seems to work.
Does any one have the same experience?

[isazi]

Wrist optical HR on mountain bike is very hard to get right, and the sensor on the 5 is years old, so not sure you can get good results with it. Not what you want to hear probably.

[Egika]

@NL-Paul wrist heart rate is a constant challenge.
Especially during biking where you firmly grab the handle bar and get shaken all the time.
Also skin color and probably hair has an influence.
Best solution: get yourself an external chest strap HR sensor again which you can easily connect to your S5

[Saketo Nemo]

Ovviously the ambit 3 heart belt is compatible with your suunto 5, so you can use that, if you still have it.

As mentioned, handlebar vibrations are the worst to counteract, even worse than running in my experience.

[Stefan Kersting]

If you want exact HR measurement you have to use HR belt and not the wrist. There is up to 20% difference between wrist HR and belt HR

[NL-Paul]

Many thx. The reason I bought the 5 was the broken heart rate monitor on the Ambit. I’ll have to search for HR Belt. Thanks again.

[isazi]

@NL-Paul I use the optical HR of my S9for hiking and mountaineering, so I’m sure you can use the one on the S5 for many activities.

[Łukasz Szmigiel]

I used to run with OHR and it was really ok for regular flat runs. The OHR struggled to get a good reading when going downhill fast when there were lots of erratic hand movement in difficult trail runs.

So I went with H10 and I’m happy. For regular runs I don’t see that much of a difference (well, maybe first 10 minutes are sometimes weird with OHR) but when doing trails HR belt is pretty awesome. The reaction time with HR belt is amazing compared to OHR.

However, for hiking and regular walks OHR in S5 works well. I very seldomly get weird readings for no more than fifteen seconds.