stride, recorded activity distances and step distances (some noob questions)

Yes, no cutting in this case. But the speed is low and the terrain seems to be open, so the GPS signal should be strong.

My experience is from running forested trails. I notice that when I run on forested trails the "current" position on the watch seems to fall back a few seconds and trail behind. At running speeds that can often be 15-30 ft (5-10 meters) and even greater. However once I start to do a sharp turn that trailing behind position cuts through and goes through the path I never ran, and often results in shortening the distance too. I'll see if I can find some examples.

Another case I notice that effect is that when a Strava segment ends at a trail intersection and I do a 90 degree turn at the end of that segment, when I follow that segment live on my Fenix 6X watch it often can finish that segment. What I observe on the watch is that the remaining segment distance goes down to 0.01-0.02 miles (16-32 meters), then once I pass through actual segment end, the distance starts increasing again. The distance never drops to zero and the watch never detects that segment had finished. Later, looking at the map I see that the reason for that is cutting through that corner.

If the watch wasn't smoothing GPS positions, the path would be quite wobbly, so it is understandable why Garmin does that.

silentvoyager said:

If the watch wasn't smoothing GPS positions, the path would be quite wobbly, so it is understandable why Garmin does that.

I'll ask again since you didn't specify - do you have Data Recording set to Every Second?  Based on your statements, it sounds like you do not.  Try it, you will like the results better than what you are currently experiencing.

HTH

silentvoyager said:

Yes, no cutting in this case. But the speed is low and the terrain seems to be open, so the GPS signal should be strong.

I'll never understand the conflicting "common knowledge" often expressed in these forums.

When I post a good looking cycling track, the criticism is, "Of course it looks good, it's supposed to, speed is high - bad results are seen when speed is slow.

Then, when I post a good looking walking track, the criticism is, "But the speed is slow... so the GPS signal should be strong."

It appears there is no such thing as a good looking GPS track for some folks.

But I digress.

Of course I do have it set to every second. That's the first thing I changed on my watch year and half ago when I got it.

But that shouldn't matter. If you read the support article, smart recording applies only to writing data to the device storage. It still gets GPS positions every second even when in smart recording mode, then it decides whether it needs to write position or not, depending on whether there are any sharp changes in speed or direction.

Finally, I should mention that I used 6 different GPS watches since 2011 (Garmin and Suunto), so I know a bit about how GPS tracking is supposed to work, and I see differences between Fenix 6X and all other devices I used before.