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?

  • I have an identical problem and it only started recently. I daily cycle 9km to work and  Garmin started to make ludicrous readings stating that I frequently cycle over 200 km/h. Moreover, on numerous occasions my cycle started on 60+ km distance and trimming even the first second resulted in 0km cycle. In these instances I do not even see any peak speed in time trim option. The time graph shows regular speeds but the distance graph started with me warping to 60+ km distant location.

  • +1 here with the weird speed/distances while walking and biking. Issues started recently (1-2 months?) apparently after some firmware update.

    I'm certain it's not a phone GPS issue as I'm in a location with clear skies 100% of the time, I also Google location tracking enabled on the phone (S23+) and it records the time and distances accurately. I restarted the watch a few times already and also made sure to be outside with clear view of the sky before starting tracking an activity.

    Does any Garmin customer support person ever responds or acknowledges these issues on here?

    Having to manually correct the distances after every activity is not acceptable and, needless to say, if this is not corrected it will definitely impact my decision to stay or move to another brand come time to update/replace the tracker.

  • I wrote to support and send them all needed files and examples, so hopefully it will be resolved if its not in 3.14, havent chance to tried out yet

  • I did the garmin update yesterday and went for a walk (activity) after and it glitched on me again with a really high distance. It also glitched on me again on my ride to work this morning. I am also working through tech support but they want me to send them more files which I will do when I find a spare minute to connect my watch to my computer again. 

  • Hooray!  I got the firmware update to 3.14 today, coincidentally right before I went out for a bike ride and it seems the distance tracking is accurate again.

    I still got an odd max speed of 4MM+ mph but that's probably because I forgot to complete the activity at the end before getting back indoors. I trimmed 10secs from the beginning and the end of the activity and the speed spike went away.  I'll just need to always remember to start and stop the activities that use GPS while outside I guess.

    Hopefully this is the end of these glitches.

    Cheers!

  • I did the firmware update 2 days ago now and 2 cycling activities and 3 walking activities have all been accurate. Fingers crossed! 

  • well, yesterday I tried also with 3.14, and instead of 48km it showed 94km..

  • Ugh... you're right. I went for another bike ride today. I made sure to start and stop the activity outside where the GPS signal is clear but it still showed twice the distance I rode and also showed the speed spike glitch.

    Oddly enough, trimming the first and last 10s of the ride corrects the avg speed, but I had to edit the distance manually.

    Thankfully the heart rate and estimated cals seem to be unaffected by the other issues. These are the two metrics I care about the most.

    Still, it's very disappointing. 

  • So I spoke too soon. I did the garmin connect update last week and then a couple days later when prompted I did the 3.14 firmware update. With my fingers crossed hoping 3.14 was the fix, everything was good for cycling and walking distance tracking activities until today when it glitched on me again. I have since followed up with technical support again. Perhaps another firmware update will fix the issue? 

  • Still happening here too.... short 1 mile walks reported as 19.49 and 20.31 miles this morning, and an afternoon hill run for a measured 0.3 miles reported as 19 miles too.