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Experiences with SatIQ?

have some of you been using SatIQ? any thoughts on how well it works and if it's a good choice for overall battery consumption.

in theory, it sounds like an awesome feature, but i wonder what it's like to use in practice. i have only now have updated to FW12, so i don't have any experience yet and wondering if should explore it or just stick to what is working and i'm currently happy with:

when i first got my watch, i tried out the 3 different options. GPS only, for some reason, acted wonky on me for a couple of runs so i didn't pursue it any further (lost track a couple of times and gave me inaccurate data). i tried multi band a few times and was impressed with the results, but found that All Satellites appeared almost as good (i couldn't really see a huge difference in my use applications with some portions of my runs and hikes under tree cover), so i have stuck with All Satellites for all of my activities for the past 3 months. i seem to concisely average about 3%/hour burn time on my 955 Solar (noting that the solar is probably helping a little there, although many of my runs are just before sunrise so the solar insolation isn't appreciable). this burn rate is almost entirely using a chest strap (OHR presumably off), but i haven't seen the OHR hit to be that much during the occasional run where i don't wear a strap.

i guess the best way to test this out be to pay for DC Rainmaker's Analyzer to see what the burn rates look like for SatIQ vs the other three options. anyone done that? ;)

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0 derek87 over 1 year ago in reply to S.M.R.

thanks for all of the tips. yes, i do use Runalyze, so i can use both that and Connect IQ to see the data.

0 S.M.R. over 1 year ago

I tried a short (7km run ) this am with SAT IQ and I noticed no significant difference in the battery usage. Of course how one knows which mode it actually connected at during the activity is another question?

0 derek87 over 1 year ago in reply to S.M.R.

so, unfortunately FlipStone's battery field isn't granular enough to really get more detailed info that i was getting by just observing battery percentage before and after my run. this is the same for his great glance/widget. it seems Garmin changed something after the 935/945 where it isn't reporting the battery percentage beyond whole number precision, so the burn rate can only be computed at a very coarse resolution. i wonder how DC Rainmaker is seemingly extracting a much finer resolution burn rate in his analyzer. i may have to see if he will answer how he does that.

0 webvan over 1 year ago

Not sure about the battery part but in terms of performance I'm not impressed by SatIQ, it seems to be favoring battery life over accuracy. With SatIQ selected, I ran on a 350 meter track the other day where "Track Mode" can't be used and noticed my pace was too fast, indicating overestimating distance. That's a problem as it will overestimate VO2Max and throw off the metrics.

A few days later I ran on a 400 track without "Track Mode" with both the FR955 and my trusty Venu 2 that I've found to be extremely accurate on a track (it doesn't have track mode) and found that the FR955 matched it's performance (about +1%) when it was set to ALL+Multiband. With ALL it was about +4%. Didn't have time to try GPS or SatIQ that time but it would have had to be worse.

0 FlipStone over 1 year ago

Thanks for the promotion of my battery info field and widget ;)

But indeed, for some reason garmin only returns the full percentages of battery (with the 945 this was up to 2 decimals!) so it's very rudimentary... Not much I can do about that unfortunately.

I tried satiq myself though and didn't really notice THAT much difference myself... Also, I prefer accuracy over efficency (and the whole idea of satiq is efficiency right?). Even in proper circumstances I use multiband because even then it adds to the precision imo (pace being more stable and all).

But I can imagine for ultras and the real long distances it would be helpful and useful.

0 S.M.R. over 1 year ago in reply to FlipStone

That Mirrors my experience and also my thought on why I have the max GPS setting on.

0 derek87 over 1 year ago in reply to FlipStone

great insights FlipStone and S.M.R.. i think i am going to stick with my All Satellites use which is the precision i like and battery usage has been fine.

Flipstone: is there anyone on the developer side of Garmin to ask about these changes? it would be great if they could explain the change or if there is another field you can tap into (it seems DCRainmakers is able to extract more precise burn rates, so it seems like it may still be possible)

0 derek87 over 1 year ago in reply to derek87

actually, i stand corrected. i just went to DCR's review of the 955 and i see discrete jumps in battery at what seems to be 1% increments.

0 FlipStone over 1 year ago in reply to derek87

I remember a similar situation from a long time ago (735xt i believe) where this was also a thing. That was simply a firmware thing and there was no way to get more precise info (also not with more access) so assuming the same is the case here.

Quite sucky though and can't understand why but hey, there's more that Garmin does which i can't understand

0 jamorris01 over 1 year ago in reply to derek87

You might be able to get a more precise burn rate from FlipStone’s data field. Even though it only has access to whole number battery percent you do know the exact % at the incremental drop points on the graph. For instance when you drop from 54% to 53% you know you are at 53.9% and when you drop from 51% to 50% you know that’s 50.9%. Take the elapsed time between those 2 points and you have your burn rate. So if you ignore everything before the first % drop and after the last % drop you can calculate your precise burn rate. In this image I dropped exactly 3% in 33min 2 sec. Someone please correct me if I’ve gone off the rails completely.