GPS Polling Rate

Anyone?

There was a session put on by one of the Garmin people at one of the developer summits (2018?) and one of the things discussed was "smoothing" of the data.

Imagine running, with the garmin on your wrist.  While you run, your arm moves backwards and forwards, and without smoothing and a higher rate, you'd see each time your arm moved back and forth, and not really see what your body was doing - just the arm.

For some sports, say cycling, downhill, snowbording, this back and forth movement isn't an issue, but you still wont see the fit file recording this data at 5hz.

My use case is motorsport, so would be in the same boat as downhill/snowboarding on the arm movement.  I thought with the new 5Hz feature in the firmware, the .fit also is compatible with this sampling rate.  Is this not true?

On many devices, the default fit recording is "smart", with every second being an option.  Every second is what you think, while smart is every few seconds,  You can check the fit file, but I really doubt you see anything more than every second and with smart, even less often than that...

Yes, I am aware of that setting, thanks for the responses.  My main point is the chipset in these watches can sample at a higher rate, and the SDK should allow developers to take advantage of that capability (even at the expense of battery usage).

What is your use case where you need 5hz and not just use 1hz?  There are a number of things the FW can do that aren't exposed in CIQ.

My usecase is motorsport lap timing on pre-defined tracks.  I have over 5,600 tracks (road, oval, go-kart) ready in HotLap (app link above) and sadly I can only sample data at 1Hz. While this works, its far from preferred when traveling at 80+mph.  The higher the sample rate, the better, and at 5Hz+ I can get much more granular in evaluating the data post session to see where you are gaining/losing time in corners and where you moved/turned into an apex on track.

"evaluating the data post session"

Using the fit file, where the data is written at most 1hz?

I read that when the firmware goes into 5Hz mode, it is written at 5Hz into the .fit (https://the5krunner.com/2025/05/23/garmin-to-add-game-changing-features-for-downhill-mountain-biking-5hz-data-recording-and-timing-gates/).  Today, I then convert the .fit file to a .vbo format for post analysis processing via third party apps.