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Hike Activity Highly Inaccurate.

Has anyone else noticed that when using the Hiking activity:

1. The distance field reports more distance than the actual distance.

2. Moving time and stop time are highly inaccurate. These two timers don't start and stop when they should. Very very buggy.

3. As a result of three, the moving and overallspeeds will also be wrong.

I don't understand how these awful bugs can go for years without fixing. Gamin, please fix this !!!

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0 gdmercad over 5 years ago in reply to Carlos Roig

Having the same problem with my 5X and would too like to know the fix. Came over to Garmin from Suunto and had a pretty much rock solid GPS on the Ambit 3 Peak.

0 dpatrick9us over 5 years ago in reply to gdmercad

mine still crappy in terms of distance logged. explanation above from sis651 makes sense. curious, why did you migrate away from suunto if you had good experiences with ambit 3 peak? at one point i swore i would never buy another suunto, but with my lousy experience here w fenix 5, i'm reconsidering.

0 gdmercad over 5 years ago in reply to dpatrick9us

Suunto will be discontinuing Movescount and the options for the Ambit 3 will be limited with the new Suunto App. I do like the Garmin's ability to utilize the recorded data for overall fitness. For my next backcountry hike, I will be bringing both of them. Suunto was excellent in GPS recording my last 4 dayer down in the Grand Canyon. (Hermit and Boucher).

0 Former Member over 5 years ago

Where did you hike and can you please share the logged route with us?

I've noticed that the F5+ (and every other GPS device that I've got) can be highly erratic when hiking through valleys or next to sheer rock formations which can reflect the GPS signal.

On my last hike through the Blue Mountains in Sydney - Aus, I logged something like an additional 5km on a 40km hike as the GPS coords appeared to bounce up to 100m away from where I was actually hiking before snapping back on the next poll.

Oh, and you think that this is an issue for hiking? Try training for an ultra when you have absolutely no idea of your real pace (without having to buy a foot pod)

0 Former Member over 5 years ago in reply to sis651

sis651 said:
When you stop and stand on a specific point, it doesn't stop you directly. GPS signal is wonky and needs filtration before it turns into a useful data.

It frustrates me to no end that Garmin dont use the accelerometer to validate the distance travelled since the last GPS poll. If the accelerometer indicates that I havent lurched forward fast enough to move 50M in one second, then the new location should be declared anomalous and the new location plotted via dead reckoning (using the compass bearing and accelerometer data)

0 dpatrick9us over 5 years ago in reply to Former Member

hiking in and around Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado, terrain a mix of moderately heavy forest, open areas, and/or near rock formations. also frequent stops waiting for a slower companion. inaccuracy around 15% (garmin mileage around 1.15 miles or so for every map mile. i have an old garmin Oregon model that I will test against, since I don't think this is so much a terrain issue even though some of the terrain I hiked through is prob challenging for a gps. overall, totally not ok for a $500 watch marketed for (among other things) hiking.

0 mcalista over 5 years ago in reply to gdmercad

Yeah, the antenna bulge on the Ambit 3's was as ugly as sin, but damn it worked!

0 kthomas84 over 5 years ago

Also curious if anyone has found a fix. Have been hiking in Rocky Mountains and consistently show more mileage on Garmin fenix 5s than is indicated in AllTrails. I thought maybe AllTrails wasn’t using 3D distance as these hikes have had a lot of elevation gain, but I looked at my Garmin map today and it has zig zagged lines all over the place that I know are inaccurate. Why am I even using the fenix for hiking when apparently my phone has better gps and battery life?!

0 Jesus_Arango over 5 years ago in reply to Former Member

Erratic GPS or location have nothing to do with the problem. It is just that on these devices Garnin has done a terrible job in their algorithm that determines if you are moving our standing still.

This can be trivially reproduced anywhere. Start a hike activity and sit down for 30 minutes and see how much distance is reported. If you enable auto pause the distance won’t increase. But in a real hike auto pause does a crappy job. It pauses when you are moving slow under tree cover and has a lag in pausing and starting. So you end up with the opposite problem: much less distance than the actual distance.

0 SHAWNBENBOW over 5 years ago

I have the same issue while hiking, that the Fenix 5X often over-estimates the distance travelled. It also seems to have gotten worse over the two years that I have used it. I notice that the biggest issue (but not the only one), is when I stop the GPS keeps racking up the distance even though I'm not moving. In some cases I've stopped to eat lunch for 20 minutes and 'travelled' 500m while sitting still.

In comparison, when I'm running or walking a consistent pace, I don't seem to have the same troubles. Though I do notice when I'm cycling if I stop for a few minutes in one spot it starts adding additional 10s or 100s of metres to my distance.

I usually hike with my wife who has a forerunner 910xt, and I sometimes bring along my old GPSmap 60CSx, and those two other units tend to report very similar distances that are within expectation of how far I've hiked.

It's sad that these two older units seem to outperform the newer F5X.

I feel like the F5X GPS algorithms are doing a poor job handing this situation, and I really hope that they get fixed. I would appreciate if someone from Garmin could weigh in here and discuss what's going on.