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So we just live with the fact that the Fenix 6 Pro's GPS has issues?

ejdzsin
over 3 years ago

I bought my Fenix 6 Pro two months ago, after years of dreaming about having a Fenix. I somehow always waited for a good deal, but then the newer models came out etc., and tbh my Polar M400 and later the 735XT were working great.

The first surprise came relatively early, as I ran on a small race where my watch recorded a distance of about -6% (~500m off on a 9K track). After this, I started reading about the F6's GPS accuracy and was quite shocked from what I read. But since the watch cost a ton of money, I was hoping that I can fix it, as it is just a matter of settings - so I thought.

I changed my settings to 1s recording, GPS+Glonass, both 3D settings on. I started to soak the GPS for several minutes. Everything on the watch is up-to-date and the CPE is current. I made EVERYTHING perfectly.

Then I ran the Berlin Marathon at the end of September, and while running through the Brandenburger Tor, I happily raised my hands and stopped running, since the watch showed 42,2 km, there was a time measuring carpet and I thought I made it. Yeah!

After some seconds I realised that there are some 100 meters left to the real finish line. In the end, the watch recorded 42,66 km. But hey, 2 days ago it was the same mismatch on a 9K run, what an improvement!

Here are some disgusting really nice screenshots.

     

   

  

I could upload dozens of these but you probably get the point.

As I first asked Garmin support about it, they told me to master reset the watch, which I did. But it didn't get better. Here are some examples again:

  

   

These are not even in a city anymore. It's just so sad.

I'm extremely disappointed, especially given that my Polar M400 and also my Forerunner 735XT did not have these problems. Here is a 735XT (on the left) vs. F6Pro (on the right) comparison:

   

I've run hundreds of these rounds in my life and not a single one was recorded wrong by my old watches. And not a single one was recorded correctly by the new one.

The worst thing is, I can't trust the watch anymore. I don't know if I ran 30 km or 34 km after a 32 km run. I can't trust the pace, I can't tell what speed I can run and what I can expect at a race. Running with a constant pace of approx. 5 min, I get this pace chart:

I obviously don't slow down to 6:00 pace while running, why would I do that? That's garbage.

Garmin support will not help, they tell me this is ok from a flagship model in 2021.

Also, after reading a lot in this forum, my impression is that some people are in the state of some sort of cognitive dissonance and don't acknowledge the issue. Is this really normal? We just pretend that it's not that bad and argue that GPS isn't important, suggest people that they use a Stryd instead of their several hundreds of $s expensive watch, and anyways, it has so much cool features that it's still worth it? 

I would return the watch if I could, but it's older than two weeks. I also can't sell it on ebay, because I can't lie to somebody who would buy it that it's a good watch and he/she should pay a lot of money for it. 

I think most thing I can do is to tell people the truth on forums and discourage people from buying it. I wish somebody would have done the same to me.

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  • 0 over 3 years ago in reply to silentvoyager
    silentvoyager said:
    . The navigation still has issues - the watch is basically unable to stay on a course when running on trails and keeps going off-course / on-course multiple times per hour. Pace Pro is unusable because of that

    Now that's weird because I just don't see that at all. This summer I did three map-navigated ultra's, 30, 40 and 50 miles and I had nowhere near this. In fact for the one I saw it once. I use routes a lot and they've always been pretty rock solid for me. And in wooded areas as well as open moors.

    Plus my distances also add up. I've no idea what's going wrong for you, but it's bad. There's some underlying issue there for certain/.

  • 0 over 3 years ago in reply to silentvoyager
    silentvoyager said:
    GPS is still shifted to the left relative to direction of running - always to the left in what seems to be 90% of the time.

    I've noticed that GPS traces usually shift to the side the watch face is pointing to while running. My assumption is when you wear the watch on the left wrist, most of the satellites will be fixed on the left side, causing the track to shift to the left. If you wear the watch on the right wrist instead, the GPS traces will shift to the right side.

    This is due to the position of the GPS antenna in the watch. There is a proverb, "What are the three most important things for GPS accuracy?". Antenna, Antenna, Antenna."

    So you can improve GPS accuracy if you support a strong GPS signal reception by making sure the watch face is pointing to the sky. And improving GPS accuracy will also affect related metrics such as pace, etc.

    ejdzsin said:
    Then I ran the Berlin Marathon at the end of September,

    When I look at the pics I don't know what OP expects in the mostly urban canyons. Even an open area and a clear sky are useless when the antenna points to the side or ground.

  • 0 over 3 years ago in reply to subra
    subra said:
    This is due to the position of the GPS antenna in the watch. There is a proverb, "What are the three most important things for GPS accuracy?". Antenna, Antenna, Antenna."

    Why I've never seen the same effect when running with other watches, for example, most recently, Suunto 9? It also has antenna built into the watch bezel and the same Sony GPS chip. It did have plenty of GPS issues with Suunto 9, but I've never seen such a pronounced shift to one side.

    I would expect antenna orientation to affect signal strength. I can also understand that antenna direction could emphasize one GPS signal path over other in a multi-path case, but do you think that should be causing a pronounced shift to one side regardless of where satellites are? 

  • 0 over 3 years ago

    Yeah, it is rather bad. I thought it was horrible until I got a V800 to see if it is that much better in the difficult area that I run in.

    My conclusion is that the Fenix 6X is below average but nowhere near as a catastrophe as you are suggesting. And yes, I do use a footpod for pacing. Unusable otherwise 

  • 0 over 3 years ago in reply to silentvoyager
    silentvoyager said:
    I can also understand that antenna direction could emphasize one GPS signal path over other in a multi-path case, but do you think that should be causing a pronounced shift to one side regardless of where satellites are?

    Yes, if you wear the watch at the left wrist so that the watch face points to the left side, you'll mostly get a left shift of the trace in your running direction. Even when you run an u-turn the shift will remain at the left side in your running direction. There are days with small shifts of the traces and other days with large shifts. And of course the satellite constellation is also important, e.g. GDOP and many other things.

    There are already some discussions in this forum and many users have proved that the F6 has a weak or insufficient located antenna. The Sony chip is able to process the GPS signal accurately. But if the antenna delivers poor data, it results in garbage in garbage out. This can't be fixed by SW.

    So the only thing the user can do to improve GPS accuracy is to support the GPS reception of the watch by trying to point the atenna in the satellite direction, i.e. in the sky.

    And other brands have had the same problems, but in the meantime they have fixed it with redesigned new watch models. Although Corus Vertix 2 use dual band but as the reviews shows it's not such a great improvement as expected.

    So as OP already mentioned, I think we've to live with this at least in the near future.

  • 0 over 3 years ago in reply to subra

    I dont know if its possible but maybe Garmin could implement a solution to also use a phone GPS if the user have the phone with him/her on the activities.

  • 0 over 3 years ago in reply to AndersB

    Good idea. But then a watch is no longer necessary and we are back to the upper arm wearing cell phone period for running. And in some sports it's not possible to take the phone with you, like swimming, ...

  • 0 over 3 years ago in reply to subra

    Your answer had sent me into a rabbit hole of reading about GPS antenna designs. GPS signal is circularly polarized. When it reflects in a multi-path case it becomes much weaker and also changes the polarization rotation, and a good antenna design deals effectively with rejecting reflected signals.

    However, considering the design of GPS antenna built-in into Fenix bezel, I don't know how well it can deal with these issues. I am not even sure it can be selective to polarization rotation direction considering the bezel is just a solid piece of metal, or at least it appears to be. Perhaps Forerunner series watches have a better antenna design. Also this makes me wonder that perhaps the geometric size of bezel matters too because the signal gain would be stronger at specific fractions of the wavelength. That might explain why we see no complaints from 6S owners but plenty of complaints from 6X owners. 

  • 0 over 3 years ago
    ejdzsin said:
    I also can't sell it on ebay, because I can't lie to somebody who would buy it that it's a good watch and he/she should pay a lot of money for it

    Same here Rolling eyes half of the functions I bought this watch for are broken. And I can't sell it because I don't want to scam a potential buyer. So I just have to live with the idea I wasted 1k € lol Pensive

  • 0 over 3 years ago in reply to Dr Phil

     said:

    I am sure that if you go back to your retailer and show that you believe the watch is not fit for purpose they will refund your purchase. Pretty sure consumer law in most countries would support you.

    Unfortunately I don't think so. Garmin has some ridiculous margin for possible errors; I read something like the inaccuracy for the watch is allowed to be 180 meters per minute WHILE STANDING STILL. So if I'm off just a bit, it counts as something within these boundaries and hence good enough.

    In which case you must have been aware of the folly of buying the watch from the numerous forum posts decrying the performance of the GPS. But still you did!

    I meant that I read these forums after I experienced my problems. Pre-purchase, I just read some reviews, like DC rainmakers etc. This was a good lesson for me :( So I'll try to reach people before this point.