Garmin Forerunner FR220 Test Mode.

Garmin FR220 training for a 1/2 marathon.

Good morning anyone ;-)
I love to run...more than 2 km but at this stage less than 30 km..Road , track , hills, Hot..
After 4 years of random training, my times were with-in 2 minutes of a 90 minute 1/2 marathon. I needed to train smarter & better.
My old Polar watch died so having Garmin Forerunner watches burned into my mind as the top of the pile, i jumped on the early adopters list for a new Garmin Forerunner 220...  Garmin look to do both Alpha and Beta testing of products on production user purchased devices. My opinion is if you want to purchase a watch, not have to do updates and just want to go running, then don't get a Garmin watch that has been out for less then 12 months. Pre-read the Garmin Forums and Ray's site http://www.dcrainmaker.com/

It had a few ( cough..cough) bugs when it was first released in November 2013, but by firmware version 2.90 it was stable and very usable for distance running.

Basing my training on the Hanson method of training for the last 16 miles, not the first.And using heart rate zones based on LTRH i had the best 18 weeks of running that eventuated in getting under 90 minutes with energy to share ! 87 minutes for the Gold coast half in July 2014.

OK... what now.... hm... time to play with this USB/Bluetooth connected device....
The watch mounts like a USB memory device.. several folders with settings, logs , activities... nothing all that interesting for now...

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 TEST Mode.


Most Garmin devices have a TEST MODE.. it only took a few minutes to find Test Mode on the FR220.

Power it off.
Hold in the UP and Down buttons ( lower left two) while powering the watch on with the light button ( top left). Release the light button but keep the other two pressed for over 7 seconds.

You should get the first image in the below photo.

Pressing the LAP button ( lower right) steps through the other test screens before looping back to the first screen.

When on screen 1 pressing the start/stop button ( top right) turns the vibrate motor on and off.

On screen 2 the start button steps through a range of LCD colour and alignment screens.

Screen 3 is a button test screen.

Screen 4 is GPS, Heart rate and footpod test screen. If you have a footpod or HRM on and in range it should display their serial numbers and some times my unit shows movement data.
The GPS test is in 'GPS TEST' mode by default. Pressing the light button toggles between TEST and FULL. When in full the watch turns on the internal GPS and displays the SNR ( Signal noise ratio ). I have found it to display a nIumber between 16.00 and 28.00 if it can just see one or two satellites but would not show GPS lock if you were to have it in normal mode and want to run. An SNR of over 42.00 is very good. Normally I see mid 30s when in clear open sky's.

Test screen 5 just looks like a back light, contrast and pixel test screen. Pressing start button just flashes a black refresh or something up the screen.

Screen 6 is the 3 axis accelerator test screen.

Screen 7 is ANT test mode. you can turn on and off ANT test mode and switch between 3 carrier frequencies. Love to know if anyone knows how to put this to use ?

The last test screen is the Blue tooth 4/ BLE test screen. Several selections of tx rx freq and channels are available. Again i have not done anything with this mode.

So that was it.
Usefulness .... We can see the battery voltage , and if the watch is getting a good satellite signal.
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USB conversations when in Test Mode.

When the watch is docked into its USB cradle and powered it shows the battery charge level in %.
Unlike some previous Garmin watches you can not charge the watch while using it for an activity.

I had the idea to see if the USB drive looked different when i try to connect to it with it in TEST MODE. It didn't jump to the usual % charged mode , it stayed in TEST MODE and was not mounted as before in USB memory stick mode.

I tried to talk to the watch using all number of terminal emulators and GPS tools with NO response at all... until i used the free version of GPSU52.  ( I may have loaded the 'GarminUSBdriver'  by this stage as well.)

Here are the settings that worked for me.

Open 'Interface Monitor' in the GPS menu.
Then click 'Connect' in the same menu.
BINGO !...well its something..

Poking keys did nothing more.. but when i clicked 'Connect' for the second time i got this:

As the red annotation on the image shows, converting the hex string returned by the watch to characters tells me i have good data from the watch.

Web searching for a few hours found a few very old docs on Garmin USB protocols but nothing that looks like the record types in the above image.

Wait a minute.. back when playing with TEST Mode, screen 4 allows for TEST and FULL GPS testing. The above dump was in TEST mode, not full.. lets look at the data in Full mode.

The FULL mode dump was taken outside with clear a clear sky. Googling finds that record type 99 looks not to have been decoded, but there is some info out there on type 72 ( Satellite Data Record ). See page 15 of this doc).

Now lets pull apart one type 72 record.

Now lets pull out each field.

The data in the green box should be the GPS satellite number, Elevation and Azimuth at the time i did the capture ( Bendigo Victoria Australia, 5:33PM 13-March-2015 DST ).

The staus bits do not look to match 100% with the document. More work needs to be done on this. Got any ideas ?

I used the Trimble web site to take a snapshot of a skymap that i hope will show the GPS satellites that should have been visible to the watch at the time of the capture.

Your Beauty ! All 9 satellites reported by the watch were in view at the time AND each elevation and azimuth are with in 1 unit of the watch ! ( Sat#21 is under the QZSS data box in the above image).

By the way the QZSS satellite is the first of 3 Japanese satellites that will allow us in this side of the world to have GPS lock in built-up streets, canyons and in doors through windows.