Wrong step count when using hiking poles?

That's a possibility, but I'm not sure it would be that easy to be corrected software-wise.

Have you seen the same discrepancy when you walk, say, with hand in your pockets? 

steps are counted based on the movement of your arm since that's all the watch can sense. Possible the accelerometer does not pick some steps because your hand is more static when using the pole especially going uphill. I rarely use poles and never look at step counts so I have no first hand experience but it seems reasonable that poles may cause issues. If step count is very important to you, a footpod may solve that issue. They don t make the old one that was tied to your shoes, instead they only have this one for runners that does more than you need www.garmin.com/.../010-12520-00

It's been known for years. When I hike without my footpod the steps count is sometimes 50% or so, and that's expected.
Most people think they move the sticks in sync with the feet but that's often not the case. In addition to that when ascents/descents are very steep is quite common to just keeps the sticks still and perform several steps.

The watch only detects movements at the wrist level. Once you keep the stick still the watches detected no steps/movements at all, followed by a long jump.

Pretty much anything that doesn't have a typical arm movement will have reduced step counts due to the missing arm swing. One way around this, if you don't mind wearing a chest strap, is the HRM-Pro. Since it counts steps on its own and can detect movement in a different location it usually picks up steps even without an arm swing. Once you sync TrueUp will take care of combining the step counts from both devices.

SebCologne said:

do you know if this has been addressed by Garmin so far?

My Garmin Watch is Not Accurately Counting Steps

The Garmin SDM4 foot pod is indeed no longer available, but some compatible ANT+ foot pods are listed here: https://www.thisisant.com/directory/ (select foot speed+cadence) such as Cardiosport ANT+ Shoe Pod, Geonaute ONmiles Pod, Adidas Speedcell, Wahoo Stride Sensor. Also Suunto made one. Used ones turn up regularly. I use a few, each calibrated for a specific use case (Nordic Walking is one). Batteries last way longer than in the Running Dynamics pod.

This morning I checked the very same page, only to find that no device from that list is either still in production or available on Amazon IT.

I'll treat my Suunto Foot Pod as a precious thing

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm not aware of any foot pods that count total steps.  As far as I know they'll give you cadence (steps per minute), pace and distance. 

Thanks for pointing that out, that's true.

I use only current speed and cadence from the FP and haven't used the steps metric for ages. Back when I did, I was using a CIQ field that displayed the number of steps in the current activity. Not sure if that was a data field from the CIQ store, or if I made it myself. It may have been a running steps count total based on cadence in a certain time-unit.

Haven't tried that so far.