Alti / Baro not getting it right

TonyG

Northern UK Last night had a pretty big storm come through and my peak didn’t trigger a storm alarm!
My Prosser Barometer (marine instrument) was recording pressure changes in excess of 2millibars per hour, which by all counts is a rapid change and should have been picked up by the Peak. (s9b worked as expected).
The peak instead was just changing altitude throughout the night and into this morning despite being in the house and sitting down watching tv and then in bed. A couple of times throughout the evening I set the altitude hoping it would recognise my not moving about but to no avail.
Since having the peak but more so since the last update I am constantly altering the altitude when I’m in the house and within a couple of hours its off again, unless I take it off the wrist it seems to assume any movement must mean I am outside walking up and down hills.

Mff73

@tonyg
Suunto specifies a drop of 4hPa mini during 3 hours.

were your 2mbar/h drop long enough ?

Did you check/clean your 9P baro sensor ? Behaviour of this altitude could be “just” signal of baro sensor dirty. You could try the “fridge” test (search the forum for explanations).

TonyG

@mff73 thanks for the reply, the actual Barometer mbar drop and subsequent rise was a lot greater than 2mb per hour (that’s the resolution on my marine barometer) but even that is still greater than the 4mbar over 3 hour needed to trigger an alarm. also as mentioned the S9b triggered as expected.
I haven’t cleaned the sensor; looks clean and holes not blocked in any way but will do that today, and will try the fridge test.

I do believe the sensor to be working as expected its the translating pressure change to actual pressure changes rather than changing the altitude that’s not working as expected.

surfboomerang

@tonyg Just to be sure… you’ve enabled storm alert in the watch?

I received an alert yesterday in The Netherlands because of that same storm.

TonyG

@surfboomerang yeah, the alarm is definitely enabled, thank you. I’ve cleaned the sensor so will see how it performs over the next week. not got huge faith though.
I reset the altitude again ready for the fridge test and approx 30 mins later it was 10m out again.
Put it in the fridge and temp change was from 27c down to 5c and altitude / baro reading remained relatively stable 1 meter difference which didn’t change again whilst the watch warmed back up on my wrist.

isazi

@surfboomerang got the alarm too in the Netherlands yesterday with the Peak, while the Baro didn’t show the alarm.

surfboomerang

@isazi Peak did but Baro didn’t?
Isn’t the algorithm the same in both watches?

BinoWorld UK

@tonyg this is rather interesting, in my experience with my Suunto traverse Alpha, if the pressure drop isn’t steep enough within a period the alert won’t go off. I am based south London and at around 11ish yesterday my storm alarm was triggered once.

In your case, perhaps set you watch to manual tracking only the Barometer and monitor. I am afraid you might have to wait a bit for the next big L pressure.

Cheers

TonyG

@optics-field-test I am left wondering if the pressure drop and subsequent rise was too great and the algorithm at that rate of drop / rise assumes the watch must be moving rather than it being real pressure changes.
Looking at the history from the BBC it dropped close to 4mbar in an hr, if the algo samples over three hours and it was greater than say 10mbar (plucking a number out of the sky here!) which may not happen too often - although with climate change we may see more events like the one that passed over last night, then the algo might assume its not pressure change due to weather rather its pressure change due to change in watch altitude???
all just guessing here but one possible explanation, maybe!

TonyG

@optics-field-test said in Alti / Baro not getting it right:

In your case, perhaps set you watch to manual tracking only the Barometer and monitor. I am afraid you might have to wait a bit for the next big L pressure.

its been a while since I used my Ambit 3 peak, but i am sure the Peak handles Alti/baro functions differently in that you cant choose the priority of either it just runs in the background fully automated.
thinking about this I may even be thinking how the observer handled alti / baro functions, but that is going back near 15 years;