I am getting different answers from different sourced it seems. So, we would LOVE to do away with the “receiver” and go with only our phones as receivers for the G5, but we’ve heard you MUST use the receiver as one of the devices that get paired with the transmitters.
We haven’t tried it yet, but whenever the current receiver leaves warranty we would love to ditch the receiver and only go with the phones.
Anyone have a definitive answer on this? I guess we could go with only 1 phone paired only (no receiver) and use share for the other phone…but we were hoping to have both Erin’s and my phones as receivers via the G5 mobile apps.
We hardly ever pair a receiver, and several of our transmitters have only seen an iPhone. So I think you should not have any concerns.
I do think there may be issues with combinations of phone and receiver pairings. But my understanding is that it is only within 15 minutes of starting/stopping a sensor. We have never had a problem with phone-only pairing.
No issue I am aware of with combination of both a single phone and a single receiver.
OR
A single phone and a single pump (acting as the receiver).
Potentially the “15 minute” issue you mention has to do with potentially “bricking” the receiver. This is only relevant to the “old” receiver and comes into play if you power down the receiver within 15 minutes of disconnecting from the transmitter. Or something like that.
Although in practice I agree, I am not convinced the limitation is built into the transmitter. I have a feeling the limitation is built into the Dexcom software running on the receiver, or on the pump or on the G5 Mobile App or from the Dexcom cloud servers (which come into play when the G5 Mobile App is used).
Potentially this could be confirmed or rebuked by one of the xdrip folk attempting to connect a second smart device via xdrip. My suspicion is the connection would succeed. In fact, I would expect 3 xdrip smart devices to be able to connect. Even 4. Shot in the dark but I don’t think it is actually controlled from the transmitter.
Although generally, I believe the Dex CEO, this is one time when I think he may have overstepped his technical knowledge. Referring to the time he said two devices can connect due to two bluetooth boards in the transmitter or whatever it was he said like that. It just doesn’t make sense for multiple reasons and I don’t buy into that explanation.
Indications are that when Dexcom provides software to allow a SmartWatch to connect directly to the Transmitter that you will still be able to have the SmartWatch as well as a SmartPhone also connected to the transmitter as well as the receiver. In fact, it sounds like it may be required to also be using a SmartPhone as the SmartWatch may not have 100% functional replacement value of the receiver (as the SmartPhone does). Meaning some particular functions may be required to be done from the SmartPhone. AFAIK the software is not ready so that is speculation based on a couple of comments dropped from some of the Dexcom calls. Hard to tell how much of the few comments are speculation, hard facts or merely generalization. Point being it lends some credibility to the possibility that the transmitter itself may not be hardware limited to two devices. (Not to mention that is simply not how BLE operates.)
I can tell you with certainty that you do not need to use the receiver. I’ve never tried to pair 2 phones simultaneously. Isn’t that what the Dexcom share stuff is for?
We use Follow. The reason I’m asking is that we want each of our phones to be able to act as the receiver regardless of who Liam happens to be with at the time. The phone that is not acting as the receiver at the time would access the data via Follow.
We are thinking, alternatively, of just getting him his own phone. That would fix our concerns easily enough.
I have a G5 Receiver and an iPhone 6 paired with my Transmitter at all times. I’d be afraid to get rid of the Receiver because at LEAST twice a week my Transmitter and iPhone won’t talk to one another and I get the dreaded “Signal Loss ???” message.
I have tried restarting my iPhone 2x a day as has been suggested on other threads.
We do the same. It works well for us. Most of the time my son can check his numbers on the apple watch, but when the connection craps out, he always has the receiver in his batman belt.
We have tried it both ways: like you and with just the iPhone. We find that, for us (iPhone SE, several of them over the past 2 years), if we restart the phone religiously every evening, with no other Bluetooth device on, we never get the dreaded “signal loss” error anymore. But it seems we do get the signal loss error occasionally, if we restart once a day, if we use both the receiver and the iPhone simultaneously.
You may want to introduce yourself on the Welcome thread if you wish.
I used to get a lot of signal loss errors when pairing with my phone. I feel like I don’t get them as much now that I’ve started only inserting my transmitter on the left side of my body and always keeping my phone in my left pocket (even when sleeping — it’s in the left pocket of my LL Bean cargo sweatpants).
I now only insert my pump on the right side of my body. I rotate both but keep them each on their own side.
Unfortunately I haven’t been recording any data about signal loss frequency, so I might just be imagining things.
(Also, I never restart my phone, and I don’t ever use a Dexcom receiver.)
I do use a bluetooth, but I’ll try restarting with it turned off for a week and see how that works. And I posted in the Welcome thread, thanks for the invite!
You do need bluetooth to connect your phone to the transmitter. But you could tell the phone to forget all the other bluetooth devices, for instance. (On the iPhone go to settings > bluetooth, tap the (i) next to a device you want to forget, and then click “forget this device”)
Question - how can I confirm which of the 4 Dexcom Bluetooth devices listed is for the current connection (all 4 say “Not Connected”)? I don’t want to assume it’s the top one.
If you go into your Dexcom app menu then select Settings>Trasmitter, you can see the serial number, “SN.” The last two digits of the serial number will be the two digits after “Dexcom” in the settings>bluetooth folder for your current transmitter. You should be able to delete the rest without a problem.
)