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Experiences with SatIQ?

derek87
over 2 years ago

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? ;) 

  • 0 over 1 year ago in reply to 5407156

    Yes Multiband is different from All Systems.

    All Systems uses the same band as regular GPS (American) but adds European/Russian/Chinese postitioning satellites to the mix. In my limited experience, there is no noticeable improvement in distance and gps trace accuracy but the battery consumption goes up. Although there must be situations where the All Systems setting helps, I just haven't encountered them.

    Multiband is significantly more accurate but also the most power consuming.

  • 0 over 1 year ago in reply to derek87

    Yes. Instant Pace is better without negatively affecting battery life as much as Multiband does. 

    Multiband is obviously better around bridges/tall buildings. This is where SatIQ can be useful, but unfortunately it seems to default back to GPS only.

    Rainmaker also found that All Systems was very close to Multiband in his New York city test. 

    "The one interesting caveat is the Fenix 7 base unit (the cheapest one), which, seems to split the difference there. In fact, I think at the right party with enough drinks it could pass itself off as dual-frequency GPS tracks. Unlike the older watches, it has the same GPS chipset provider as the Fenix 7/Epix Sapphire with dual-frequency. And for all we know, it might actually be the exact same chipset inside (with simply software enablement of dual-frequency). Nobody has decided to sacrifice $1,600 worth of watches to find out."

    Garmin Fenix 7 Base: All Satellites (Basically GPS+GLONASS+GALILEO)

    https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2022/04/garmin-vertix-accuracy.html

  • 0 over 1 year ago in reply to Bitti

    All systems provides better pace without negatively affecting battery life as much as multiband. Multiband is obviously great around bridges/tall buildings/cliffs. 

    Is there any way to see which mode SatIQ is using? A datafield or can it be extracted after the run from the activity files?

  • 0 over 1 year ago in reply to hassan987

    "Perhaps on a rainy day in the jungle"

    Pretty much what the very common Trail Run is. In my country (ZA), we have more trail than road running events. Getting permission to close off roads is time consuming and costly.

  • 0 over 1 year ago in reply to Aslam

    It might be a good idea for you to do an All Systems vs GPS only comparison in those conditions.

    I'll try to find some GPS-only traces from my own and my friend's (who uses auto select) connect account as well. We recently did a rainy wooded trail

  • 0 over 1 year ago

    I test it from less one month and I see that, against multiband with 1 point to second, I have those differences:

    - battery increase from 18-20h (100% of battery calculate with test of 2-4h....) to 24-28h, more better;

    - less track precision on the tracks with more curves, I think because sign a point more than one second usually;

    - some error with a rapid change of condiction (from street to wood or something like this)

    It's good for recharge less time battery (good for her life....) and for ultra, but it's better use multiband with a city marathon.

  • 0 over 1 year ago in reply to Effepigi

    As you say, SatIQ doesn't cope well when GPS reception conditions change rapidly.

    For any activity of 12h or less, I'd always suggest All+Multiband.