My Alta keeps reneging on me having hit the 250 step per hour goal

[FuzzyBoots]

I've been trying to do my "250 steps in an hour" tracking goal. My Alta will buzz me at the 50 minute mark and I'll generally quickly jog out the required steps until it buzzes again. Except... I just resynced my band, and two of the timespans I jogged on, and was told I hit the goal, are marked as unsuccessful, with my step count having fewer than 250 steps (albeit not by much). I'm not adding any manual step activities, and I would have expected the band to be the arbiter of truth here.

Is there any recourse other than sandbagging and always making sure I well exceed that goal?

[pcpix]

This happened to me yesterday for the first time, but that may be because I usually go beyond the 250. I was reminded by the Alta to get moving and I did (I only needed 6 steps). It buzzed and congratulated me, but then when I synced in the next hour, it showed that I missed the 250. Here is something else I noticed recently: when I manually refresh the app on my phone, I sometimes "lose" steps. So today I was walking and refreshing the app and it went from 4900 to 5000 and then back to 4925. I was walking around the office and easily took 100 steps. Losing steps would explain why suddenly I didn't get my 250. Except that we should not lose steps.

[FuzzyBoots]

Yeah, that's been getting worse too. Last night, I ended with 10,900 steps with my tracker having buzzed me at 10,000. Today, it claims only 9500. My workplace gives bonuses for hitting 10,000 enough days in the year, so this lack of consistency is starting to cause harm rather than just being an annoyance.

[FuzzyBoots]

Well, I've figured out why the latter happened, almost by accident. I entered in some exercise, using the data from Zombies Run, which provides an approximate distance based on stride count if you don't have GPS enabled. Fitbit took that distance, divided it by the provided amount of time, and assumed a different step count. Since that app does step count via the phone, and I generally continue using the phone while running, it usually undercounts my steps (since I'm holding the phone stable enough to be able to read it), that accounted for a lesser distance, and therefore fewer steps. Deleting that exercise brought me back to the proper step count for the evening.

Doubly frustrating because I called Fitbit support on the 10th, and their basic reaction was "Well, either you misread both your app and your band, or your band isn't calibrated correctly" and then promised to send me instructions to check my band's calibration that I never received.