Whats best hiking GPS settings?

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?

0 RandyPenn1 over 7 years ago

I have noticed that GPS does drift a bit when I'm stopped, so that could definitely add some erroneous distance to your total.

0 Former Member over 7 years ago

I use GPS+glonass and 1 second recording. had no problems, except if there is a bit of climbing involved.

0 tylosaurus over 7 years ago

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.

0 Former Member over 7 years ago

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!

0 newtonfb over 7 years ago

hmm....I just checked and I do have it on Smart recording. Most of the hikes I do are 3000-4000 elevation gain so that might be it.

0 Former Member over 7 years ago

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

0 mbell-SVK over 7 years ago

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