Signal Drop-Outs During Group Rides

Bugs and Support
1

Had used Zwift quite a bit a few years ago, and with the COVID-19 lockdown in UK back in march I upgraded to a Tacx Neo 2T, and went through the process of trying all of the various training platforms. Trainer and HRM sensor were stable on them all, but I really liked Zwift for the workouts/races/ and the social group rides.

However, around the time of the Tour for All rides I started to get intermittent drop-out of all sensor values mid events, despite it being fine in the warm-up before hand. It always seemed to happen in the larger group-rides with more than 200 riders or those with pro’s where there could be thousands.

When you’re doing a group ride, or race, it’s highly frustrating when this happens as you get launched out of the back of the group with no way to recover - meaning the session is wasted, especially if it’s a race.

Take tonight as an example, 11th June. I joined the ride with Sir Bradley Wiggins, joined in plenty of time and the connection was rock solid for the 20 or so minutes of my warm up. But about 30 seconds after the ride started all sensors dropped out on both PC and companion app, and wouldn’t recover until I unpaired and repaired them and relaunched the companion app. Seemed like Bradley Wiggins may have had the same issue!!? As he wasn’t able to join the event.

Further into the ride, the bluetooth signals got screwed up again, this time freezing on a certain wattage (305w in this case) but the cadence still seemed to be correct - and even stopping pedalling, repairng, relaunching companion app wouldn’t resolve it. Had to repair with the trainer using an Ant+ dongle that I then also had drop-outs with almost immediately.

What I can’t understand is why these issues keep happening with Zwift, and I have never once had such an issue with Tacx Training, BKool, RGT etc.

Cant imagine it’s a PC performance issue, as it’s an Intel i7, with dedicated Nvidia Geforce graphics card and is capable of running Grand Theft Auto V on high/very-high settings. Also have 43MBit fibre broadband, that is still connected fine in other apps when drop-outs happen.

Any ideas would be welcome, as I’m seriously close to ditching Zwift for good as can’t keep having training messed up like this.

I have the log file, how do I attach?

2

Hiya @Spin_Diesel
Thank you for the detailed description of what happened.

Deep-dives for individual issues are best handled by reading the log file “tea leaves” off line. It’s not possible to upload log text files to this forum to prevent that as a vector for malware. Instead - please email your log files as an attachment to an email to support@zwift.com, and please copy-paste your description.

Sounds like you know where to locate your logs, but just in case, here’s how.

3

Thanks,
I’ll ping them an email with the log file in that case, as nothing immediately jumps out from looking at it in Zwiftalizer.com

4

When i have been plagued with drop outs it seems to be garmin software on pc running in backround messing things up somehow. after shutting it down compleatly zwift signal has been much more stable.

5

I’ve heard of the Garmin Software causing issues on PC before, probably because it’s polling bluetooth looking for a headunit. I have a wahoo cycle computer, which I don’t use on the turbo, and have no 3rd party software running that would be checking for bluetooth devices.

Thanks for the suggestion though.

6

Have you tried aiming a fan at the trainer incase it is overheating?

7

Two fans, one at 45 degree angle catching me and the trainer a little, and another from the rear for the “tailwind” which also catches the trainer. Can’t imagine it’s overheating within 10-15 minutes of use, when only warming up doing 100-200w at 90rpm, with 20c ambient room temperature.

8

Hi,

something new? I’m also having dropouts. If I see the LOG file in zwiftanalyzer the drops coincides with a reconnection but while the HR has no drops the TACX it does.

Thanks