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Is everyone in the habit of manually setting your elevation before every ride?

Apologies if this has been asked before but every time I boot up my Edge 840 and allow it to auto-calibrate elevation data via GPS, it reports an incorrect starting elevation.

To correct this, I have to either manually input my starting elevation or manually calibrate it using DEM data. I've submitted to Garmin that they should also provide an AUTOMATIC calibration based on DEM data instead of only defaulting auto-calibration to GPS.

I've never been in the habit of setting my elevation before every ride as I always assumed Edge devices accurately measured barometric pressure to self-calculate elevation. However, as I dig through more of my rides, it looks like my starting elevation is all over the place both across the Edge 840 and my older Edge 530. As I live in a flat area, it's never been much of an issue as there's nothing to climb, but the inaccuracy of it all finally bothered me enough to start digging into this data.

TIA

Top Replies

PeterK_55 over 1 year ago +1

If you create a location close to your start point, it will auto set the elevation to that point when starting an activity. (or at least it does on a 530)

All Replies

0 PeterK_55 over 1 year ago

If you create a location close to your start point, it will auto set the elevation to that point when starting an activity. (or at least it does on a 530)

0 bradtipp over 1 year ago

That is what I do. set to a known good as I ride up my drive.

0 dpawlyk over 1 year ago

You don't need to do this for elevation gain.

You only need to do it if you are interested in the actual elevation. Not something many cyclists actually care about.

Keep in mind that the elevation numbers are fairly noisy. So, "being all over the place" (hard to tell what that means without numbers) probably doesn't matter.