Open water counts meter without even moving

Morak said:

I noticed that when I stopped moving, the meter count continues to go up

Ok, unfortunately you did not write, how much it goes up while not moving. Just a few meters? Hundreds? Thousands?

While you are in open water and not actively swimming, it could for example be drift that moves you. Of course the GPS does not care - movement is movement.

Morak said:

I tried again sitting on my towel, even here the meter count goes up.

What's wrong?

Ever heard of GPS drift?

Civilians GPS is not that exact and will never be, so when not moving, this inaccuracies can be interpreted as movement and add up for some meters. Like I wrote above, unfortunately you did not tell, how big the experienced error is. See explanation here:

support.garmin.com/.../

Hi '3541523', thx for your answer.

It was around 1m/s. I thought about the drift but I was in a lake and not moving from my point. But I still tried it on my towel, so not moving at all. And it was still getting around 1m/s. I mean seriously? 

As if Garmin algorithm was anticipating my speed instead of calculating it with the GPS.

While running, if I don't move, it's not adding meters to my count. So while swimming, seems it is anticipating it somehow

GPS drift can happen with only one GPS active. Isn't the watch getting few satellites to be more precised depending on the setting we set?

Have a good day 

Morak said:

As if Garmin algorithm was anticipating my speed

Maybe that is part of the algorithm, but of course I don’t know.

Morak said:

GPS drift can happen with only one GPS active.

No. Definitely wrong.

GPS drift is always present for civilians/consumer grade GSSN devices, because they don’t get more precise that „meter/yard“

On older devices with GPS and Glonass, Garmin stated that the highest achievable level of accuracy is 3 meters, meaning „95 % of logged position will be in a radius of 3 meters around your real position“.

With the newer devices they can use multi System with GPS, Glonass and Galileo and Multi frequency, meaning two different bands that can be used to reduce the error with calculations.

STILL, the highest achievable level of accuracy is 1,8 meters, meaning „95 % of logged position will be in a radius of 1,8 meters around your real position“.

So, GPS drift is less and especially the multi frequency does a great job in reducing it, but it still exists. And for consumer grade devices it always will - the highest level of accuracy (cm) is still reserved for military and professional devices. That is no shortcoming of Garmin, but a decision of the system owners (which are countries).

Okay you made your point for GPS drift but it doesn't explain why while running, the count doesn't go up if I stop but it did while using the open-water swimming mode ? :) 

In sports like running and bicycling, you usually have auto-pause that stops the drifting under a certain speed. This is not possible in swimming, as you often drop satellite reception by putting your arms in water, and swimming is very slow even when you don't have a pause.

For what it’s worth, my Fenix 6 started doing this about a weeks ago also.  I don’t think it has anything to do with drift, it’s just counting up when I’m stationary and doesn’t stop.  Found this thread trying to find a solution. Maybe it was an update or something that broke it?

Hey, at least I'm not the only one.