I'm a Garmin user since a few years now and was on Fenix3 which i have always been happy with, recording tracks and relying on its measurments doing MTB, hiking and flying in paraglide (so mostly speed & elevation) I recently "became" a diver and plan to do this a lot in the next few months and with Descent, i could add another string to the bow, having really an all in one wearable computer.
I didn't do any dive yet with the watch, just playing in the river and the bath tub to explore the data screens and functionalities.
So i went for a hike and fly and took Descent, on which i had previously configured an "Other" app containing elevation and Vertical speed among other screens. I was badly surprised to see that the altimeter was refreshing every 10 or 15 seconds hence providing totally unusable vertical speed data, and that i was here with my new high tech watch not being able to do the ABC this good old Fenix was doing perfectly !
Going out of the app and looking at the Alti widget made me realize that it was apparently not a hardware issue as the latter seemed to work properly, continuously updating the elevation (like every second or so). I have been then playing with the parameters of the watch, disabling temperature and compass sensors (i somehow found a correlation between them, for example by overlapping temperature and elevation in Connect graphic views, i realized temp also suffers the latency, which might be on purpose given the info type. Speed and heart rate do not though).
A reboot of the watch seems to fix the problem but if i enter dive app for example, not even recording a track but just starting the app then exiting, the problem rises again, so it seems that when one or several sensors are activated by an app, it screws up the alti capability to continuously refresh within an app (I could also see the low latency behavior within the ABC widget itself, but that is not always the case, whereas it is for within an app)
But before going into details and maybe provide some screenshots or logs if needed, i wanted to know if you guys can reproduce. I'd be gald if some of you could just create a simple app with one data screen composed of 2 fields : elevation and vertical speed, and maybe try to see what happens in an elevator or even simply by putting the watch under 10cm of water.
I was quite surprised not to find anything reported in that way, only crazy elevation values but nothing regarding this refresh rate for the altimeter. Or maybe i missed it ?
Guys! Anyone got a chance to try to record an activity including elevation ? I know Descent is a diving watch first but it would be great to have other standard features working as well !
I attached 2 examples of records showing the "step" recording of elevation and 1 where it works normally with no lag. I have a friend who also has the watch and seems to suffer the same problem.
@GarminHeat can this be reported to dev team for a future fix ?
Not sure about vertical speed, but I was actually playing with my Mk1 while my flight was taking off just a few days ago and I can see altimeter changes roughly every second or so (likely purely based on pressure changes inside the cabin). I can see it changing with the ABC widget but not the 4-hr graph. Not sure about whilst in an activity though. Hope that helps!
The problem doesn't seem to occur within the ABC widget (it did once but I cannot reproduce, widget is always refreshing smoothly), in app it is always lagging, except when the watch just reboot. Don't know about the 4hr graph, mine seems to correctly retrace the history.
I wrote to support yesterday, we'll see what they say about it.
I concur. I see the same thing in my runs. I downloaded the TCX file for one of my runs. I have my Mk1 set to record every second. For my run I start at the top of a hill and it gets quite steep.
The TCX file has the altitude entries as: 223m for 5 seconds 219m for 15 seconds 216m for 30 seconds 210m for 15 seconds 203m for 15 seconds 195m for 15 seconds etc.
