Fenix 6 Series - 5.77 Beta Release

Updated my F6 Sapphire Titanium.

I am curious if this new GPS 2.70 does include a fix for the "little to short gps-distance"-problem on the Fenix 6 also.

forums.garmin.com/.../fenix-6x-sapphire---problem-with-gps-total-distance

It's funny that the last 3 updates have all included stuff for dog tracking - Does anyone use that? It sounds neat, but the collars cost as much as the watch! Also I don't have a dog, but I do have a kid - unfortunately they don't make a kid tracker, unless you put the dog collar on your kid 

Anyways, to answer the question above - the GPS update I think only addresses the issue where some people's watches sometimes take a very long time to acquire GPS signal. I don't think it addresses the "too short" or "too long" gps distance issues that a few people are reporting. I still don't think there actually is an issue with that. It only seems to be a problem when people run on oval tracks or really twisty/turny trails. Normal trails that don't make tons of hairpin turns are reporting the correct distance for most people. My measured 5k run that I do several times a week always shows me 3.08 to 3.12 miles at the end. So I'm not sure if I'd ever expect an update to address this, and honestly I kind of hope they don't, since it might screw up the measurements for straighter trails that are currently working fine as a result. But that's a discussion for a different thread I suppose.

Dog Tracking, I assume that is most interesting for people hunting. The expensive collars also sold in "hunting department". Cool feature!

I think you are right with regard to GPS "too short". I only experience this on trail running, and all my trails are so far in between trees in hilly terrain. On asphalt flat roads the GPS is only negligible "too short".

The Forerunner 945 with identical hardware seems to work better, probably due to it's non metal casing.

I couldn't care less about half the features being worked on like DogTracker, but honestly I really appreciate F6 being the favored Garmin model right now. I'm sure it helps being common HW & features with MARQ, and we're probably beta testers for what should be trickling down to the 945, which might be getting a raw deal on SW. I'd be curious to get internal stats on sales #s, gross revenue and profit by model, as I suspect that F6 and MARQ prices are really incentivizing Garmin to develop for them right now. Maybe competition from Suunto and Coros helps....

P.S. I owned Instinct and then 945 before returning each to buy F6X. The total experience with F6X has been much better (but you're really paying for it).

Just going off what I've noticed in the Reddit forum for Garmin, it seems to me that most people are either buying the Vivo/Venu series of watches, or the Fenix series. No idea if that's an accurate representation of their actual sales or not - but I know there are definitely a LOT of Fenix owners out there. I think it's their "flagship" watch.

So I plugged my watch into my PC, and copied the new GPS firmware to the RemoteSW folder, but noticed there was already another file in there called gup3107.gcd. It appears to be the same 2.70 GPS update file as the one I placed there manually, just with a different filename, and I think Garmin Express put it there automatically when I plugged the watch in. So I deleted the one I placed there from the Beta update .zip file, because I don't know what would happen if there were two identical update files with different filenames in the RemoteSW folder. Just a heads up for other people installing this Beta. No idea if it would cause an issue or not, but I didn't want to be the guinea pig 

And how must Garmin solve this? They need to interpolate when there's no GPS signal. In order to do they need to make a few assumptions. So it is an estimation and not a measurement at cost of accuracy...

That was also the case with Fenix 3 and 5: there were bugs to fix the whole day long and they had nothing else to do than fix dog track :-D