Absurd speeds and distances

Hi all, 

Lately my wife's vivosmart 5 is calculating absurd intervals and statistics.

Recently we went on a walk where she apparently walked vastly libger than I did. Inspecting the data she apparently managed to walk 4.63 km in 1.1 seconds. Or minutes? Both pretty astonishing. 

Today we went biking. Again, she achieved inhuman feats:

She is getting pretty serious with her biking. But I'm fairly certain she did not go 237 kph on her bike. Even better, she did manage to achieve this 5 kilometers of this interval in just about 300 meters.

This may be related:

Pretty sure her bike isn't rated for this speed. I plan to do a full inspection on her bike just in case she did achieve 0.2 percent of the speedbof light on her bike.

Jokes aside this is a recent development and we are wondering if this may be related to the update about a week ago. GPS is done on the phone, we know, but it does seem illogical that there are no safeguards against data or GPS issues when calculating speed or distance. I have had flawless GPS reception during the same ride. On my 955 as well as the phone. She and I both use a samsung s23 in case that is something you are interested in.

Any tips how to improve the situation?

  • didnt work for me. I didnt have one properly recorded ride since update

  • I have the same problem which started last week; walked a mile and VS5 reported the distance as 38.77 miles. Per Support all my software is current so forced closed the app & restarted the phone. Today my normal 10.5 mile ride was reported at 7.5 miles, pretty frustrating....

  • Unfortunately, again a ride with.a wrong distance: 86 km. instead of 8 real km’s. Apparently reset did not work after all.

  • weird, today for me it was first time with also less distance than real.. is there a way to rollback update?

  • Change the distance  in the website (connect.garmin.com). Select the activity, press the wheel icon (top right) and select 'Change' in the pulldown menu.

  • I'm happy to hear I am not alone with this problem. My 1.5 month old vivosmart 5 has been having the exact same glitches for the past few weeks. Sometimes it will show 0 km for the entire ride then track speed, other times it will display an insanely long distance that is 3-5 times the distance I know I rode and hold it there. Sometimes it shows the wrong distance and sends that to the connect app but displays either the wrong or right distance on the strava app. Happy to hear it's likely not a watch issue...hopefully a software/firmware issue. I had a vivosmart 4 before this 5 that was flawless with the same iphone and same connect app as the new 5 I have now. Only reason I had to "upgrade" to the 5 was because the band on the 4 was starting to tear and wasn't far away from tearing completely. Hopefully a solution can be found to this issue. 

  • When I make a dump of the .fit file from the website, I see that at a certain point the distance changes to a wrong (too high) value, while, at the same time, the coordinates don't change. 69.76 is the distance displayed on the watch and in Connect on the iPhone. How is the distance calculated? Is it a problem for the software when the coordinates are the same as in the line before?

    In all the activities with a wrong distance, it always occurs when the coordinates don't change.

    record.position_lat[semicircles]	record.position_long[semicircles]	record.distance[m]
    621748583	71822114	13668,47
    621748733	71822347	13673,65
    621748835	71822397	13674,77
    621748835	71822397	69761,99
    621749783	71821948	69761,99
    621748572	71825381	69761,99
    

  • Same problem here.  Wildly inaccurate bike speeds and distance. 

  • It is my wife's Vivosmart5. I'm using a different Garmin watch and got correct results. The Connect app read speed and distance wildly off (high readings) while the actual GPS map plot of the ride was exact. Since the vivosmart5 does not have an onboard GPS I checked all the GPS settings and functioning on the paired phone (Pixel 7), and the phone is functioning correctly with all other apps. Garmin, please check into this...

  • Our first observation of this problem was a bike ride on 2 September 2023, two total incorrect bike rides as of today 9 Sep. GPS tracking in her walks looks normal.