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Look at this, my FR10 has better GPS than 945 (update, tested both watches today)

9386496
over 4 years ago

The GPS on the 945 is really starting to be a let down. Why is my ancient FR10 watch better than something £500? The FR10 tracks are dead on the path, if you zoom in on the 945 it looks even worse. When I run with FR10 the current pace stays the same but with 945 it jumps up and down. Garmin made a huge mistake moving to the Sony GPS chipset!





  • 0 over 4 years ago

    Do you think it makes sense to compare GPS tracks from two different days? (June 2, 2018 vs October 4, 2020). I expect that the tropospheric and ionospheric conditions may be different and that this may cause a poorer quality of the track.

    Also we know nothing about your device settings (for example: GPS / GPS+GLONASS / GPS + Galileo, 1s or smart recording).

    Please, try to record the same activity with both devices and then compare their tracks.

  • 0 over 4 years ago in reply to RunGeek
    RunGeek said:
    record the same activity with both devices and then compare their tracks.

    At the same time

  • 0 over 4 years ago in reply to Dr Phil

    ofc - that's wanted I want to say when I said "the same activity" - but maybe I didn't say clearly enough. Slight smile

  • 0 over 4 years ago

    Check if you get a different result with GPS soaking which is suggested by Garmin to increase the accuracy of the GPS. That means that after you get the green GPS signal you wait a few more minutes before you start to move.

  • 0 over 4 years ago

    This subject has already been discussed extensively in this forum and I'm afraid that there is no "solution", that is if you consider this to be a problem.

    Garmin has made the choice to use a GPS chip from Sony in the F945 that has lower accuracy than the previous models but has a ridiculously low power usage. It's a compromise, one that many users are happy with.

    I personally lament the loss of precision a little bit but to be honest, these are not devices that you should use for mapping or anything that requires extreme precision. For sports training, as long as distance (and therefore speed) is good enough, why care?

  • 0 over 4 years ago in reply to KubrickFr
    KubrickFr said:
    why care?

    Because if I want to see my trail in the forest when I was doing orienteering as exactly as I took it. As it's not just looking at the distance and pace, it's the route choices. Usually the errors don't do much, but sometimes they do. How close I was to the checkpoint when I didn't see it. Etc. Accuracy matters.

    I would love to see dual channel GPS to get more accuracy and then have settings to turn it on/off when I need/want to.

  • 0 over 4 years ago in reply to jmto

    I’ve never done orienteering, but it looks like a lot of fun.  Totally makes sense that for a sport like that to analyze how you did afterwards the most accurate GPS is critical.  To top it off, when you are in the woods is when the GPS signal and accuracy is the worst.

    Have you looked at Garmin’s new multi-band GPSMAP 66sr instead?  Obviously not as convenient as having it on your watch but if accuracy is a higher concern than convenience this may be an option for you.

  • 0 over 4 years ago in reply to KubrickFr

    I've searched extensively and I don't think it's talked about enough. Well personally to me the GPS is the most important feature, I wish I had kept the 935. When running with that watch my pace never changed during easy runs or thresholds. With the 945 the pace jumps up faster or slower when I know 100% I never slowed down.

    The distance/speed is not good enough when an FR10 is better. On one of my routes I run past some buildings and I do 5x1K with the FR10 and the pace is it exactly what it is. With the 945 by the 3rd rep it shot up from 3:10/km to 3:30/km and I didn't change speed at all. This happens everytime. The guys that developed the algorithm on the FR10 did a great job.

    On a side note the heart rate was better for me on 935 (it never shoots past 180 on my 945). And my 5K race prediction was almost spot on 935. 945 it is 2 minutes slower even though I ran close to my PB using the 945 lol what. 


  • 0 over 4 years ago in reply to ericgottlieb

    It is, also rogaining is fun (different type of orienteering), was doing it 6 hours on saturday. Best part of it is nature and you really need to take your thoughts out of work and everything or you will don't do good job of orienteering. There's no extra brain capacity to think and worry about things.

    But for that device there's trouble that you should not use any electronic device to help you. So meaning you shouldn't look traveled distances from the watch etc, and 945 having maps is also kind of bad in that sense, but I'm not doing it that level that it has been a problem, just don't use those to help you.

    It would probably be pretty bad to explain having that kind of device with you.. and where to put it, there's no back bag with you. So really ideal device would be screenless, small, highly accurate GPS-logger, but wrist watch is the easiest to have with you and you don't need multiple devices.

    That saturday's 6h https://connect.garmin.com/modern/activity/5627031423 there's the map and the real route we took, this time garmin had it easy as the map was 1:25000 so 1cm is 250m, it's usually more like 1:10000, like this night orienteering https://connect.garmin.com/modern/activity/5577362810 unfortunately I took screenshot of the map as I can't scan A3 and it's pretty small and hard to analyse ont that picture what happened around checkpoint 10, but zooming the Garmin's map will help..and it will tell me that I did came directly to the checkpoint but didn't see the flag and then started to look around to find it.. I don't know was I blind and somehow didn't see it or is the GPS lying.