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Altimeter woes in watch mode

I have my Fenix 5 Plus set to calibrate itself continuously. I have been having a lot of issues with the watch’s way of treating elevation changes.

I calibrated it based on the GEM (mapping) recommendation in the morning. It seems unstable when I go down underground to catch the tube and go back up to exit. The altimeter would go to something like -1 when I am up in the air on DLR.

Garmin team, any help would be appreciated!
the Fenix seems to recover (+20 from -1) but that’s more than 10 minutes later.

0 NYanakiev7 over 7 years ago

Now at +25 even though I am still at the same height. There have been no changes in the air pressure today so that can’t be the reason...

0 jim_m_58 over 7 years ago

When you calibrate the altimeter, the options with auto are "During Activity"("Continuous", "At Start" and "off"), and "Not During Activity", ("on" and "off"). So continuous, is only during an activity (it's using GPS, (maybe to get a map reference to look it up?)). "Not During Activity" may be any time GPS gets a fix, it calibrates or something (such as using GPS to set the time)

0 mcbadger over 7 years ago

https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2018/06/garmin-fenix5-plus-5s-5x-in-depth-review.html#comment-2907616

0 jim_m_58 over 7 years ago

Interesting. So in watch mode (not during activity) per what DCR said it can try to use the phone's location data with the maps, but only during the users configured sleep time. So it calibrates overnight.

0 cjochetz over 7 years ago

What’s the advantage to continuously auto calibrate rather than manually doing so based on known data?

0 mcbadger over 7 years ago

People have found with the original F5 series that, if you ascend far enough, the true elevation and the watch barometer-based reading move further and further apart, even with an initial precise manual calibration and little change in weather conditions. The process described in the link in my last post should stop that happening, while paying enough attention to the barometer that you're not locked to the spatial resolution of the elevation map, or thrown off by inappropriate map readings where you're walking along a contour line and poor GPS reception moves your recorded location to the side of the path (so the watch would look in the wrong location on the map for your elevation).

0 Tisztul_A_Visztula over 5 years ago in reply to mcbadger

Hi mcbadger,

I cant find the info source. I tried to use the link you provided with more web browsers, but none of them led to me any comments of the appr. 1000 made to DCR’s indepth review.

I even searched on page terms like calibration, altitude, elevation etc , but none of the hits were about any process which fully explains how auto cal happens.

Eg. my Fenix 3 HR uses the last manually calibrated elevation at start if I am close to the place where I made this last manual calibration. Garmin page say nothing about this sub-option here support.garmin.com/.../

I just wonder whether F5+ uses the elevation datum which was manually calibrated earlier?