Problem with observationLocationName ?

Hello,

recently the observationLocationName returns something like Loca.... and not true location name as before (I only see first 4 letters as I truncate). Has there been any change or new bug? It worked before.

Thanks, Jan

  • Yes the position returns values very similar to what is set as weather position in emulator (values are about 1.2x larger than degress, but it is apparently some internal scale, may be seconds).

    In recent updates of Garmin Connect in weather location country pick list the name of my country changed from "Czech Republic" to "Czechia" (which is not correct by the way). I *THINK* that Garmin Connect may fetch coordinates and identify country as Czechia and then look into reverse geocoding database where these locations are under "Czech Republic" and therefore does not find anything.

  • The way I understand how Garmin weather works is that the phone's location is sent off to a server that uses that location to find the nearest weather station and return's it's data. And that the observationLocationName is part of the data and depends on the weather station.  That's why "Big Ben" had bad name data but other UK locations worked fine.

  • I agree with you it is likely like that. I have installed older apk of Garmin Connect, about 5 months old. The problem stays the same, so it seems to be on server side. The watch face is here, I would be courious if it works for people in other locations: apps.garmin.com/.../06819684-1882-4173-b08d-8fb8673a91f8

  • On at least some device, the locationName will also show in the Garmin weather widget.

    And search the discussion forum of threads about observationLocationName,  This isn't the first time this has come up.

  • Your app is not compatible with my VA4. I just modded my app to do the following:

    var wConditions = (Toybox has :Weather) ? Weather.getCurrentConditions() : null;
    if (wConditions != null && wConditions.observationLocationName != null && wConditions.observationLocationName instanceof Toybox.Lang.String) {
      currentLocation = wConditions.observationLocationName;
    }

    While it works on a simulator, it doesn't display location name on the real device. If I were you, I'd use a third-party API service to lookup the location name by coordinates.

    Correction: it DOES in fact display a location, with city and country. My previous comment was wrong because the sideloading failed.

  • Try https://apps.garmin.com/en-US/apps/c051f37a-8fad-4907-b124-0112fe010c91

    It's got on-device settings where you can select what you see for garmin weather.

  • Thanks very much Jim. Your watch face also returns Location [ 50***.... as location name. So it again points to server problem. I have reported the bug to link I found in other thread (about Big Ben).

  • Jim, your app shows my location perfectly.

  • As I said, it very much depends on your location,  Look back through the discussion and search for "big ben" when it comes to observationLocationName.  It's not an issue with the ciq app,or garmin weather in general, but the specific location's data.

    As far as accuracy, the Garmin weather isn't that great for my location.  Being 10F off isn't uncommon.  OWM is better but needs a free APIKEY.

    The best, by far is weather underground.  There are something like 100k weather stations in the US, 5 or more within a mile of my house, including one in my back yard.  The drawback is you must have a station that sends data to WU to get an APIKEY so more difficult than OWM

  • This is one of the first things I published in the app store - A WU widget.  for the first few years, anyone could get an APIKEY, but WU stopped that and now requires that they get data in return. Too much support was involved for people that didn't submit data.

    https://apps.garmin.com/en-US/apps/f509fc4e-7f1f-48a5-b337-ed86668c5f6c