Poor Elevation readings

Hi,

I do not have a solution for height problems on-line while using the watch (I'm suffering from it on every mountain bike ride).

Yet, following the sync of the activity, if you go to the Connect website, you can fix height by using the height fixing procedure in the activity itself and there near the watch picture.

Hi,

Thanks for replay.

I've seen the elevation correction in GC - it seems to work fine but not perfect (still couple of meters difference).

Anyways VA's recorded elevation is incorrent - is it enough to complain?

Same goes for me.

Waiting 60 seconds after GPS connected.

Tried with the watch off my wrist. Tried with it on different wrist. Tried blowing gently underneath it.

Cleaned the barometric ports.

It always starts way higher then I end, although I start and stop at the same place! 

This is how it looks.

Same starting and end point of the activities. 

Same goes for me.

Waiting 60 seconds after GPS connected.

Tried with the watch off my wrist. Tried with it on different wrist. Tried blowing gently underneath it.

Cleaned the barometric ports.

It always starts way higher then I end, although I start and stop at the same place! 

My complain is open with them for several months now.

My watch was replaced with a refurbished one which also didn't helped (of course).

We are few but there are many out there and here in the forum that are suffering from this.

It always start at the correct height (as it calibrates when getting a fix) but then loses accumulation and at the end of a round trip I find myself with my home "lower" by ~80m and with ~30-40% less accumulated height than it should be.

I'm about to buy the 945 now as it has some software algorithms that overcome this.

It is a shame that we didn't get a warning prior to buying this model that it will not track the altitude as you'd expect...

Yeah, I've also tried everything...and still nothing.

So is there any official Garmin statement?

My previous Suunto Ambit also had some "problems" but the difference was about 5-10 meters.

There has been much discussion of this on the Forum and with Garmin support.  Don't ever expect to have this resolved, it won't be.  The barometric altimeter in the VA 3 is horrible.  It is not designed to be incredibly accurate.  It is a simple device to provide a low cost solution for the watch to provide full time information for stairs climbed and general elevation while using very little power.  

The device does not have the computational performance to compute GPS elevation in real time all the time, so the elevation shown during GPS activities will still be the barometric result, not what's coming from the satellites.  That's why it has to sit for 30 seconds to calibrate before you start an activity, it takes a while to compute the elevation solution.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but the baro altimeter is never going to give you great accuracy.  I've been around in circles with Garmin support on this.  They have sent me a ForeRunner 645 to test out for them (I live in Colorado and go through significant elevation changes during a day's activities) and it was equally bad for the same reasons.  Total elevation gain during an activity can be off by as much as 25%.  They've reviewed many .fit files from my account and seen the glaringly obvious error and confirm this is the way it is for these devices.  It is the design tradeoffs made.

So why option of manual change of altitiude is off?