How I found my Garmin Forerunner 235

If you are here, you are probably in the same (or similar ) boat, having misplaced your Garmin Forerunner 235 in the house but are unable to find it. The newer models have a "Find my Device" function from the phone Connect app but this model unfortunately doesn't. In my case the watch had battery and was connected to the phone. The common advice is to use a device finder which uses the bluetooth signal to find the device. This model uses an older bluetooth version and wasn't getting detected on the finders I tried. 

Bluetooth Device finder to use

To use this method, your watch needs to have power so that the bluetooth signal can be detected. The device finder I used was "Bluetooth Scanner - Finder " and I am on Android. When I started the scan the device was found right away. 

The next step is to find the signal strength using the "Device Finder " at the bottom of that result. 

But the problem is the Device Finder does not show the signal strength from the device. 

To get around this, I used the signal strength shown on the main scan screen. 

You will have to move around to detect the change signal changes. Each time you move you will have to stop and start the scan to detect the signal change. 

The lower the signal value the closer you are to the device. When I dropped to ~ -40 dBm, I was only inches away. This post was about Garmin Forerunner 235 but devices using older Bluetooth versions maybe found using a similar approach. Also consider donating to the developer of the app as this was the only app which worked for me. ( I have no affiliation to the developer, just found this app helpful in getting over this pesky problem ). If you found this useful, consider replying as it may be helpful to others.