Ive had the 5x since launch and I love it. One thing that I find is my distance is a little longer than it should be. Yesturday I did a 7 mile hike and it read 1 mile longer by the end. I have GPS+Glonass and I got to thinking..maybe it keeps recording when I stop for breaks and adds that distance? What have ppl found best for their settings?
In the past, my mileage has shown too high, more when I use the 1s setting, as opposed to the smart. So, I leave mine on Smart. Try it both ways and see which works best for you.
I agree about using smart recording. To start with I assumed 1s recording would be better and used that as routine. For my use that was wrong, smart recording gives a better track and a more accurate distance.
Yet again I have been reminded why you should never assume!
Are you hiking through high mountain areas and going through the creeks or are you hiking through wooded areas? If so have a look at the map afterwards and look for GPS track changes compared to the path
In my experience the slower you go the worse results you get. I have perfect trajectory and total distance accuracy for bike rides, skiing, acceptable for running, but quite poor for hiking. It can be explained by the accumulated distance due to noisy GPS data. Be sure you pause the app when taking a rest during your hike, especially when the GPS coverage is affected by environment.
1s vs smart GPS: The difference between 1s and smart recording is just in the frequency at which the data are logged (GPS still measures every second). However, I'm not quite sure what logic is applied to compute the total distance. It could be even the same for both cases if that is integrated from the raw data (in third party apps like Strava it might be of course something different when filtered FIT file is processed).
GPS vs GPS+GLONASS: This is complicated and definitely depends on given situation and location. However, according some experimental studies the GPS+GLONASS setting can paradoxically produce worse results than GPS alone (which I can confirm personally). You can find interesting statistics here: http://fellrnr.com/wiki/GPS_Accuracy#GPS_and_GLONASS
