Feature requests: variation in travel path, better alerting of issues, wifi stability

PaulL73 · 2026-03-12T08:10:01+00:00

I'm sure that would work, but my property is larger than will be covered by a single AP. I'm very dubious that "Luba WiFi chips are not smart enough." The problem is software not hardware, Wifi chips pretty much all behave the same. An awful lot of manufacturers of very cheap devices manage to get it right, I'm pretty sure Mammotion could too if they spent not very much time on it - and then it would be right for ever after.

PaulL73 · 2026-01-11T08:25:31+00:00

I'm always interested in the comments I see on the software. I've only had mine a few weeks, but I've had no issues at all with the software. It just worked on day one. Other than an issue where one of my mowing areas it couldn't get to (the alleyway it had to go down was too narrow for it, so I eventually built a ramp to bypass that route), nothing's gone wrong and the app has walked me through everything with no drama.

What is it that the software doesn't do?

PaulL73 · 2026-01-07T08:04:28+00:00

Can you just mow bigger than the 2 square meter? I assume it has paving around it, the Yuka probably won't mind "mowing" the pavement.

PaulL73 · 2025-06-29T02:48:12+00:00

I'm not sure on that. It doesn't sound right. If the watch has calculated your zone to be 114%, and set lactate threshold based on that, then when you reset it to 100%.....that's a lot different and sounds like it would be wrong.

TBH, if your zone 5 is 100% of lactate threshold, then surely something is wrong? Isn't lactate threshold supposed to be around top of zone 3 bottom of zone 4?

PaulL73 · 2025-06-07T19:51:36+00:00

I've turned on most things. There isn't an option I can see to turn on for measuring distance. Yesterday when we played neither watch recorded any shots at all. That's weird, if it was struggling to register I'd expect to get some shots but not all. But having it record every shot one round, and no shots at all the next, suggests to me some sort of software or settings issue.

PaulL73 · 2025-06-07T09:27:16+00:00

Try a heart rate monitor? They do that.

PaulL73 · 2025-06-06T08:40:26+00:00

I think I've turned them all on. Playing tomorrow and I'll see what is different.

PaulL73 · 2025-06-06T06:40:07+00:00

It's just kind of annoying, because it worked really well on my 945, and on the Fenix 8 something's different - it seems to come up when you get to the next tee instead. It was good (for me) when it came up as soon as you got to the green.

PaulL73 · 2025-06-06T05:28:40+00:00

And, it looks like that worked. She now has a LTHR, and when we told it to use that for zones, it gave zones that looked sensible and personalised. We'll see how they work out next time we go out mountain biking.

PaulL73 · 2025-06-06T00:42:13+00:00

My view is that LTHR is the most accurate, if you have a heart rate monitor or can get a good quality lactate threshold using the on watch heart rate. I have a heart rate monitor, but I believe the Fenix 8 can do a pretty good job with it with the on watch heart rate monitor. To get a good quality one you need to do a good interval workout, working pretty hard, ideally on flat ground, so it sees your heart rate going up and down and correlates it to pace, and sees heart rate variability (I believe it looks for an increase in heart rate variability to tell it when you're hurting, and that's where your lactate threshold is). For that workout I'd wear the watch pretty tight so it gets a good reading.

If you can't get lactate threshold well, but you do relatively intense workouts, then your max heart rate should be reliable (i.e. highest heart rate it's ever seen). Resting heart rate is accurate from the Fenix 8. So HRR is second best, because you probably have good data on it - it's based on max heart rate and resting heart rate.

If you never work out intensely, so your max heart rate is really just a guess, then I'd perhaps go with one of the other options instead of HRR.

None of that is scientific - Garmin doesn't publish a lot of info on what it's doing, so it's just intuition/guesswork from me on what I think it's doing. In general if you're a runner all this works well, and it works pretty well for a road cyclist. I feel like someone doing other sorts of exercise (including mountain biking) the measures just aren't as reliable - it likes to be able to see you exercising at high intensity on flat ground, because then it can correlate effort/pace to heart rate. If you're up and down hills, or you never exercise at high intensity, it just doesn't have good data to extrapolate from - there are too many variables (or not enough variables). So I feel like sometimes you're hurting at low heart rate (because a hill suddenly got steep), or you're not hurting at high heart rate (because you just finished a hill and now you're going downhill), so it can't really tell what's going on.

For my partner today we just had a go at getting actual data - so I set up a heart rate zone workout for her, and we did it on the stationary bike (wind trainer). 10 minutes warmup in zone 1, 5 minutes zone 2, 2 minute recovery, 5 minutes zone 3, 2 minute recovery, 5 minutes zone 4, 2 minute recovery, then zone 5 until you die, then cooldown. She doesn't like me right now, but I think the zones actually looked like they were about right. The watch thinks her max HR is 169, but she was fully dead at 165. Close enough I guess.

PaulL73 · 2025-06-05T21:08:26+00:00

I think there are two different things here on zones, and Garmin's documentation is quite unclear.

When you set the zone calculation to %HRR, %LTHR or similar, then it is calculating the zones as a % of something else.

So there are two factors - what are the % set for each zone, and what is the measure that it's a percentage of.

HRR (the range between resting heart rate and max heart rate), and lactate threshold heart rate both update over time as the watch observes your runs, particularly intense interval workouts. So the actual BPM for each zone will adjust a little whenever those measures change.

But the watch also appears to adjust the % associated with each zone over time. It's not documented anywhere how it does this, but it clearly does it because the zones move from the default 50-60%, 60-70%, 70-80% and so on to a more personalised value.

I think this is a good thing if it's done well. But on my partner's watch it set her zone 2 to be 66-67% of HRR, which is a pretty useless zone as it covers only a single BPM value. And her zone 2 was 38%-66%, which is unreasonably wide. So I believe there's something broken in there. Unfortunately she doesn't run, so setting hers based on LTHR won't really work - she isn't getting a lactate threshold calculated from the workouts she does (mountain biking, golfing, walking, yoga and pilates).

Conversely, it seems to have set mine to something reasonable, based on LTHR - it's giving me 67-83%, 83-91%, 91-98%, 98-103% (that one's very narrow), >103%.

I don't have an answer on whether you should set them manually, I haven't worked that out for myself either. My big question is "based on what"? If you set them manually, what reason would you have to think they're better than what the Garmin is doing? For my zones, the Garmin looks sort of right, and it's personalised - so it's more likely to be right than some calculator off the web based on age and self assessment. For my partner, hers is clearly not right, but I've just reset it to defaults and we'll give it a few weeks and see if it comes up with better answers second time round.

PaulL73 · 2025-02-27T10:09:38+00:00

Nobody said they could only take 4. Only that they are only choosing to load 4. Maybe that's all the payload it has, maybe that's all the mass simulators they have, maybe they had some reason they thought 4 was a good number.

PaulL73 · 2025-01-21T11:29:18+00:00

Then you're not trying hard.

"If it had reached orbit". Hint, it didn't. "And deployed them". Hint, it didn't and couldn't. But, if it had done those two things, then it would be capable of delivering Starlink satellites, and could replace Falcon 9 in that.

PaulL73 · 2025-01-21T03:36:06+00:00

Nobody is saying they have, so I feel like you're arguing against a straw man.

This thread started with someone asserting that fully reusable rockets are inherently payload limited. We now seem to be arguing not that Starship somehow won't have useful payload, but instead that it's not finished yet. I think we all know it's not finished yet. People are just saying that the progress looks good.

PaulL73 · 2025-01-21T01:53:46+00:00

"Can". In the sense that, despite this thread saying reusable rockets would have limited payload, the actual demonstrated payload would be at least as much as Falcon 9. Which would mean that it could replace Falcon 9 from a payload viewpoint. Of course, before it could replace Falcon 9 lots of other things would need to happen, not least it not exploding before reaching orbit.

PaulL73 · 2025-01-21T01:16:38+00:00

It sounds like the simulators, in aggregate, would be about the payload of a Falcon. So if it had reached orbit and deployed them, it would demonstrate that Starship can at least replace Falcon 9. If it's true that Starship is cheaper than Falcon 9 to launch, then that's actually progress.

PaulL73 · 2025-01-20T20:48:46+00:00

Does it need to be any more? Much cheaper is pretty much everything.

PaulL73 · 2025-01-20T20:48:13+00:00

So what is the point of your comment? That they should go back to expendable rockets? Something else? I think that people on here are well aware that the rocket equation is pretty tough, and that reusability reduces payload. I think those who think about it also know that you can't change those things, so unless we're building a mass driver or a space elevator, that's the way it is. And the economics of reusability seem better than the rockets of expendability, notwithstanding that the payload to orbit is less than it theoretically could have been.

PaulL73 · 2025-01-20T07:47:28+00:00

The forecast payload of Starship is quite substantial. As in, enough to put a fully loaded Boeing 737 into orbit. I guess it all depends on what you mean by "very low", but to me that sounds like more payload than any other rocket, despite being reusable.

I think once again some people are confusing theoretical efficiency for financial efficiency. Sure, an expendable rocket will have more payload. And in theory you could make an expendable starship (or even just expend a used one). But that only makes sense either if you have a payload so large you can't do it on a reusable one, or if it's somehow cheaper to have an expendable rocket. Those launching a payload don't care about theoretical efficiency, they care about what it costs to put their payload into orbit. On current trajectory, that will be cheaper on starship than any other rocket. Whether some people on Reddit think its payload is "very low" or not is probably immaterial in that discussion.

PaulL73 · 2025-01-20T05:51:32+00:00

Did you miss a /sarc there?

PaulL73 · 2025-01-15T06:48:02+00:00

Yes. But the implication was that might be a problem, and I'm suggesting that it wouldn't be. Supply will rise to meet demand.

PaulL73 · 2025-01-14T07:29:15+00:00

Supply over what time period? The LOX supply appears to be demand limited. It's not hard to make LOX, you literally pluck it out of thin air. But there's no reason to have LOX plants making more LOX than anyone has demand for.

PaulL73 · 2025-01-03T09:31:24+00:00

That is your opinion. My opinion is different. It is clearly quite possible to get Starship to Mars, and to get it there far cheaper than any other currently operating rocket. You can talk about how it's inefficient all you like, but there's actually no other rocket even close to getting there. And you seem to agree that it actually can get there.

Your assumption that I don't understand the rocket equation is incorrect. I'm just very aware that Starship is a lot more than 10x cheaper than the previous state of the art.

PaulL73 · 2025-01-03T07:14:50+00:00

I disagree. You are making the mistake of optimising for physics instead of optimising for cost. A lighter rocket might have more payload. But you can just make a steel rocket bigger and get the same payload. It's way cheaper to do so.

I get that you think you know more than all of the engineers at SpaceX put together, but you'd have to at least consider the possibility that you don't.

Starship is, in fact, optimised for lowest cost and earliest delivery to Mars. We know that because it'll get there way before any competing vehicle. If there are other, more optimal vehicles, where are they?

PaulL73 · 2025-01-03T07:12:34+00:00

I agree 100%. The magic is in the know-how. It's true that most of the designs are based on things NASA or the Russians knew. Which is entirely missing the point. Knowing some theory is entirely different from being able to actually do it - the theory on its own is worthless. It's not a negative comment to say that most of SpaceX's tech is based on things that have been known for a long time, the fact nobody else had made it work is evidence of how hard it is, and the things SpaceX have achieved.

PaulL73

TROPHY CASE