Unreliable elevation readings. How do I set my watch to only use Digital Elevation Model (DEM) Data?

5497018 8 days ago

Like countless other users, the elevation readings for my Forerunner 255 are completely unreliable. Whether it's a problem with the sensor, software, firmware, or whatever. It just doesn't work and I'm not alone. This didn't use to be a problem when Garmin allowed you to grab elevation readings from the map data. It wasn't perfect, but it was magnitudes better than what we're dealing with now.

So how can I go back to that? Would a firmware rollback get the job done, or do we just have to deal with the planned obsolescence of our perfectly good hardware?

Top Replies

RDW 7 days ago +1

Sadly a rollback wont fix it.

For me the elevation changes in a run started going badly inaccurate about a year ago with an update. The sensor is fine.

But my flat runs now see 100-200m elevation increase…

All Replies

0 RDW 7 days ago

Sadly a rollback wont fix it.

For me the elevation changes in a run started going badly inaccurate about a year ago with an update. The sensor is fine.

But my flat runs now see 100-200m elevation increase.

Likewise i have to manually go and set DEM on the website BUT that doesnt affect the already incorrectly calculated training load, vo2max and so on based on bad data.

0 5497018 7 days ago in reply to RDW

That's so frustrating.

Ya I tried rolling back the firmware and while it did allow me to disable the elevation sensors, it didn't use the DEM data and just recorded no elevation change at all for the run. Which honestly might be preferable to the junk data it would be using otherwise.

The only solution I can think of would be to somehow get the watch to think it's an older device with no elevation sensor, but I'm not sure how to do that. Whether that's handled by the firmware or something more hard-coded on the watch itself.