Footpod Calibration Help

I just tried the treadmill at 8mph, so bang on 7:30 min/mile and the Garmin was showing the pod at 9:30 a mile. This is straight out of the box. I have therefore turned off auto calibration and had a go at setting the cal factor to 110 as a quick test. To my surprise the treadmill showed 7:30/mile at 160 cadence. It would, however, go slightly up or down if my cadence changed.

-- actually, not there yet.. I just set to 7mph, similar cadence and it's showing 9:00/mile 9:15/mile when it should be 8:30/mile.

walking at 4mph with 110 cadence showed 18:00/mile, then at 130 cadence showed around 16:00/mile (4mph should be 15:00/mile)

Think it might be best to either use GPS for calibration. Out of curiosity, if set to auto calibrate and you also set the factor to say 110, then I assume the pod will overwrite this 110 continuously until it works it all out.

I think it's best to not use autocal and go to a track or a known measured course and calibrate yourself. Most footpods change distance with pace. It's just a little though, so I usually calibrate at a medium speed on a track so I get the average on an actual run. Usually I always start out slow and speed up so if I calibrated at my medium pace, the final distance and average pace is somewhat correct.

The Stryd power footpod has been the best I've ever used. It doesn't vary much with pace (or cadence).

The reason I don't use a treadmill to calibrate is that they are SOOOO wrong sometimes. There are a few treadmills at my gym that match my foot pods perfectly. Others that are way different. I feel sorry for the person who thinks they are running one pace and turns out off by 20 seconds/mile.

The Auto Calibrate requires you to run outside with GPS as per the manual http://www8.garmin.com/manuals/webhelp/fenix5/EN-US/GUID-AD1867AE-4B65-4991-839C-EFD52D466B3E.html

If you want to manually Calibrate the foot pod so it matches the distance shown on the treadmill you use (noting that this may well not match outdoor pace and distance due to inaccuracies of the treadmill) then have a look at this bit of the manual http://www8.garmin.com/manuals/webhelp/fenix5/EN-US/GUID-8D622610-A937-47F9-BA59-A39CC0539552.html Essentially it’s a direct ratio, so to find the new calibration factor use the equation: current calibration factor multiplied by treadmill distance divided by watch recorded distance using foot pod.

thanks - okay, so I have just run 6.6 mile around a lake (according to Strava on my handset). I had my F5 set to get both pace and distance from the footpod, always, as GPS is pretty cr@ppy around there. Also auto calibrate is on.

Pace was way off.. said I was around 7:30/mile when I was at 9-9:30/mile - this is likely because I set the factor to 115 (to match my treadmill - which is likely off I guess). Distance and average pace, however, were the same as my other Garmin device I used to compare. Synced with the milestone app and it shows 7.17 miles run - trying to calibrate it but keep getting an error in the app!

Question: if distance is set to always then I expected the F5 to grab the overall distance from the FP (7.17m), not GPS, which is usually out by a few hundred meters. In my head this could also fabricate distances you push to strava but I did read that segments still look at GPS times so you can't cheat. I just want a very accurate pace and distance outside and GPS seems to fail me quite often

If you set Distance to Always in the foot pod settings, then yes the distance displayed on the watch and written to the fit file will be from the foot pod (even outside with GPS On). Strava does seem to recalculate segments from the GPS points recorded rather than looking at the distance source in the fit file, but for simple records like fastest mile or fastest 5km it only takes the distance source (so I have had to exclude some activities from Strava where I was messing with very high foot pod CFs of 150, as I was getting some unrealistic records).

Thanks Crispin - that's what I thought (and had hoped for) - however, it doesn't seem to working in this case.. total distance displayed on the F5 was 6.4 miles (around the same as my other watch and phone using GPS for this test), but the distance when synced from footpod to the milestone app was 7.17 mile, which is in line with fast past is showed too.

If my watch was using the FP for distance then I would expect to see 7.17 on my F5. Hoping I have set things correctly.. perhaps running with auto cal on AND the factor to 115 was a bad idea.

I have since set auto cal on, factor 100 and have calibrated the last run with the GPS distance so will see if my next run is more accurate.

This is getting interesting now. You mention using the Milestone Pod, which as I understand it only transmits the BLE foot pod profile (rather than ANT+ that the Garmin SDM4 foot pod and most people with Stryd pods use). Now, I’m just wondering if there’s something funky going on with the way the Fenix 5 is dealing with BLE foot pods when Distance is set to Always. I did some testing a few weeks back with my RunScribe pods transmitting as BLE foot pods and I deduced that the Fenix 5 was using the RS+ pod for pace/speed but not for distance. I wasn’t sure whether this was an issue on the Fenix 5 or RS+ pod side, so I’m not so sure this isn’t confirming something on the watch side now. Someone else had reported, a couple of months ago, trouble trying to get the calibration right with their Milestone pod. One way to be sure is to turn off auto detect calibration and set the calibration factor to 150, then go and run a route of known length with Distance set to Always. With a CF of 150 you’d expect the distance recorded to be about 50% longer than the actual distance, if indeed the watch is using the foot pod for distance. If the watch is not using the foot pod for distance, the the GPS distance will be given which should be around the actual run distance (or slightly under even, if in a crappy GPS reception environment).

Good idea.. and thanks for your input. Yes, I'm using the Milestone pod via BT. I will test that theory and get back to you with the result. Would it be best to reset the pod again, because the application on my phone has already pushed some calibration algorithms to it - although my Fenix still shows factor 100 with auto on.

If it turns out that what you're saying is a flaw with F5, then I will look into an ant+ FP instead.


Cheers,

Okay, I just tested a quick walk before we head out. Think you are right (unfortunately ;-/)

Auto cal off and CF set to 150: pace was super fast as expected (although average pace was about right) and the distance was same as my other watch using GPS.
With CF set to 50: pace was very slow (and this seemed to affect average a lot too this time), but again, distance remained the same as my Vivoactive HR with GPS.

It does appear that even with distance set to always, the F5 is using GPS instead of the footpod, which is annoying as coverage isn't great where I run.

Are you pretty confident that ant+ footpods will disregard GPS distance then when set to 'always' then?


Thanks again,

I have a Garmin SDM4 foot pod that works just fine for accurate distance regardless of the GOS challenges; so yes you should be fine with the ANT+ foot pod profile.