App not tying heart rate to exercise when using GPS tracker?

[Wheelhouse]

So I've had my Fitbit (Alta HR) for about 18 months, but recently got annoyed that the app didn't show distance on my walks and bike rides.  Looked into it and found out you had to enable GPS tracking with the app open while exercising (and hit start, etc).  Neat feature, and have been using it the past couple of days to get really accurate measurements of my typical walking and biking routes (my bike loop is 6.2 miles, for example, and the park across the street from me that says it's loop is .5 miles is .51 miles).

But every exercise that I've used the GPS on these past few days has zero heart rate data (so no cardio data) attached to it.  Also, the duration of any exercise is limited to how long I had the GPS tracker active.  For example when I measured the park loop, I walked a total of 45 minutes, but only ran the tracker for 2 rounds of the park (1.02 miles and 15:24).  Even though I walked an extra half hour, that exercise is listed in the app and on the PC dashboard as only 15 minutes.  No heart data attached.

Just wondered if this is just how the app is, or if there's a way I can "fix" this.  As it is, I'll likely only use GPS tracking on any given area once, and then never again - due to me liking the average heart rate data on each exercise (especially biking).

2nd unrelated question - is there any way to change the "Active minutes" goal that's on the main app page to "Cardio minutes" instead?  That active minutes being achieved every day was misleading early on for me, as I felt like I was doing better than I really was.

[presentjoy]

I'm struggling with same issue, using iOS and Charge 3. Sometimes I get average HR and sometimes not. The pattern so far, is that if I deliberately *start exercise* with the iOS app and using GPS, it won't log the HR data with the exercise. That happened today. However if I let the watch auto-detect exercise (most recently I acknowledged the exercise on the watch, which then caused my phone to track GPS after the first ten minutes) then I do get average HR. 

I'm using Fitbit to track my exercise as part of a medical study, and the investigators want average HR for every instance of exercise. So now, we're missing data. It makes no sense -- I can look at the general Heart Rate data that tracks my whole day and I can see that my HR registered during exercise, but the exercise log doesn't show HR data. It has duration of exercise, the time I started and stopped the exercise, so it seems like average HR could be calculated. Is this a glitch in the App?

What I know is this: I will not manually start exercise with the App from now on. I care less about the map and more about the Average HR. If you don't care about the GPS precision for the entire workout, letting it auto-recognize might be the thing to try.

In this image, my most recent exercise (Run) didn't log the average HR. The previous exercise (Run) was logged automatically, when I acknowledged the exercise on my watch and let GPS do its thing, you can see a map and the HR. The Treadmill instance was also auto-recognized, but I did not have GPS tracking enabled as I never opened the iOS app and I had GPS set to "Only While using".