Garmin FR945 - Pool Swimming Review

In this section, I review the pool swimming accuracy of the new Garmin FR945. To test the new watch, I went to a local pool with my old Garmin Swim watch on my right wrist and my new Garmin FR945 on my left wrist.

As with the Garmin Swim, before your first swim, you need to insert the pool size in the swimming settings.

It was a normal training day and I was lucky not to have any "traffic" in my lane. As you are probably aware of, both watches use an internal accelerometer to detect when you reach the pool wall, if you find traffic in the pool and suddenly have to stop, slow down, or speed up your swim the watch might end up showing that you reached the pool wall before you really do. To have a clean tracking of your pool swims always make sure in each turn you strongly push up/turn of from the wall gaining speed which will allow the internal acceleremoter to detect a turn.

I went for a continuous session that consisted of 34 pool lengths, in a 50m pool (hence, 1700m), always alternating style between crawl and breaststroke.

Here are the final results of each watch.

Garmin Swim

Garmin FR945

The new FR945 recorded 100 meters more than the Garmin Swim which was on track with my swim.

 Here, are the intervals recorded by the Garmin Swim. The watch perfectly tracked each interval.

The FR945 was not perfect in tracking my swim. Here are the intervals as tracked by the FR945.

Unfortunately, the new Garmin FR945 shows a split in two of my intervals (#17 and #18 and #24 and #25 should be aggregated). The last interval (#36) was also tracked incorrectly by the FR945 showing free instead of breast in the stroke type.

To sum up, regarding the tracking of pool swims, the new FR945 does a good job but it's not as accurate as the old pool swimming dedicated watch - the Garmin Swim. Somehow, the FR945 failed and inserted splits in two of my lengths while the Garmin Swim was able to accurately track those lengths. The new FR945 also failed in detecting the correct stroke type in one of the 34 lengths I actually swam. So, given this test, I rate the old Garmin Swim with 5 stars and the new 945 with 4 stars.

GARMIN FR945 - GPS accuracy

GPS ACCURACY

In this section, I provide an assessment of the new Garmin FR945 GPS accuracy. As most of you already know, Garmin changed its chipset provider - to Sony - for all models introduced on 2019. This issue has been a concern for Garmin consumers as most of you know the accuracy issues found in Polar and Suunto devices using the same Sony GPS chipset. For all the runs under analysis, I use the Garmin FR945 with the GPS+GLONASS option enabled and I always make sure the watch acquires GPS signal before the beginning of each run.

I begin the analysis, checking the GPS route logged by the FR945 on a 10K race in Lisbon. This race - Corrida de Santo António - has its 10K distance certified by the Portuguese Athletics Federation.

Run A - 10km race certified distance (Lisbon)

First, let me show an overall view of this course in blue. This race takes place in Lisbon with a section of the course in between a lot (but not that tall) of buildings and another section by the river with fewer buildings.

By the end of this 10K race, the FR945 proved to be extremely precise showing a total distance of 10'090m which turns into less than a 1% deviation. During the race, the 1K auto lap beeps anticipated the official course markers by no more than 100m and the beeps from my watch were more precise than the auto lap beeps coming from other guys' watches I heard during the race (kudos to Garmin!).

Next, I break the 10K race into smaller segments and trace the FR945 segment route against Google maps. 

In the first segment of the race, when I was running in the area with lots of buildings the FR945 had some issues finding the road - it puts me running across buildings like a true juggernaut :)  - you can see the deviation of the blue line from the red line I traced in google maps (where the road is!).

In the second segment of the race, the FR945 again had some trouble in logging my course on the road and shows me running across or flying over some buildings. As I progress to the road near the river with less buidings the FR945 picks up the correct location of my run.

The final segment of the course, as I continue running near the Tagus river, in a place with less buildings the FR945 does not have many issues in correctly mapping my run.

So essentially, on average, the FR945 had an impressive precision, but it's not all sunshine and rainbows - the watch showed some minor deviations especially in the segments with more buildings.

In my second run I go towards the fields and I add my old Garmin FR225 to make a comparison between both devices. I used the FR225 on my right wrist and the FR945 on my left wrist.

Run B - 2K countryside run

This is the overall picture of where I went for a 2K run. The blue line is the FR945, the red line is the FR225.

Overall

In the first segment of the run, the FR945 did very well, and was on top of where I ran. On the other hand, the FR225 had some minor issues as sometimes puts me running by the tree line.

In the second segment of this course, both devices decided to cut the corners on the roundabout. Nonetheless, the FR945 only misses the road by a few inches while the FR225 cuts the roundabout almost in half.

 The final segment of the course looks similar for both devices.

By the end of the race, the FR945 showed a total distance of 2017m at 5:11 min/km while the FR225 showed a total distance of 1999m at 5:14 min/km. The difference turns out to be less than 1% between devices and I am inclined to say that the FR945 was much closer from the course I really took while running.

Ultimately, the FR945 seems pretty solid when using GPS+GLONASS. This is a first-impressions analysis and I will add more tests regarding the FR945 GPS accuracy (and more) in the near future.