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GPS Open Water error

7240854
over 4 years ago

Problem with GPS during open water swimming. When I use my Garmin swim 2 in Open Water, the distance that is recorded is largely inflated (like once it indicated 2 km while I swam 500m maximum). If I come back on the shore and just stand on the beach, the distance is still increasing even if I do not move. This happens with the 3 different modes. At the same time, the GPS of the running mode works perfectly on land.

  • 0 over 4 years ago

    What stroke type do you use in OW? Remember, that only freestyle (front crawl) and backstroke are suitable for the GPS recording. During breaststroke the watch is underwater, and there is no GPS signal.

    Regarding the distance increase, on the following link you can cee a good thread on the FR945 forum about GPS drift. I am not sure why it can not be filtered out, but if it clashes with the filtering of the correct swim GPS track, I would prefer a good track and accept an occasional GPS drift while resting.

    forums.garmin.com/.../open-water-swimming

  • 0 over 4 years ago in reply to PG

    I do half breaststroke and freestyle. I know there is no GPS signal in breaststroke, so I make sure to regularly have my watch outside and have enough time on crawl to catch a signal. Moreover, this is not an occasional GPS drift. This is a major drift. there is a difference between a drift of 100 m and a drift of 1 km. Finally, for the track, I can have a good one sometimes, but here is my track today, knowing I finished at the same location as I started. My question is more: is it an issue for all swim 2? or my gps is not working?

  • 0 over 4 years ago in reply to 7240854

    I would guess that because of the breaststroke your watch loses the GPS signal, and struggles to find it, even if you show it to the sky now and then. In cloudy days if might be worse. Maybe having a vibration set to alarms might show you when the GPS signal was lost/found (I am not sure if Swim 2 fires an alarm message at GPS loss, FR910XT does)

    With my old FR910XT happened something similar earlier, while swimming front crawl, but with extra long glide (watch was underwater for too long, never happened the same with normal freestyle). The watch regularly lost GPS signal, and the track was jumping all over.

    I recommend to contact Garmin support to evaluate the issue. Also consider to switch to front crawl only at open water swims.

  • 0 over 4 years ago in reply to 7240854

    Actually it seems that in Swim2 during OW the stop detection does not work, so if you stop, the distance keeps increasing like crazy. Looks like Garmin does not apply any filter to stop the GPS drift, even is the data must be there (they can correct the track line, so they know exactly what to filter out). I guess that for breaststroke, when the watch is out of GPS signal for a while, the same rule applies.

    This is definitely a major bug

  • 0 over 4 years ago

    The cause is that the watch measures distance from accelerometers and GPS signal both. If GPS is lost, it relies ONLY on accelerometer data, and when GPS is caught, it adds the GPS distance as well. This is a terrible logic, and a major bug. I am facing this with swimming front crawl ONLY!

  • 0 over 3 years ago

    hello! i have the same problem, for example i swim about 1100meters (measured thrgh google maps) and the watch shows 1830meters !!!

    any idea how to fix it?

    or about guarantee claim?

  • 0 over 3 years ago in reply to 7947014

    I have the same problem: aprox 1600 m swam, 2400 m reported

  • 0 over 3 years ago in reply to Awesomerapier

    I waited for a friend in several occasions inside the water. I realized the watch keep on counting while I was stopped. Can it be solved?

  • 0 over 3 years ago

    I noticed this today for the first time - back in OWS for first time in 10 weeks so was taking it easier and was doing mostly breaststroke although keeping hands relatively near surface.  It registered over 2.4km when in reality only swam around 1km.  Was previously swimming mostly crawl so wasn't so much of an issue before although I have noticed the bit where it keeps adding metres when you've stopped swimming.  This is hugely irritating when the watch is marketed as OWS specific.  Does anyone know if developers are looking at a fix for this?

  • 0 over 3 years ago in reply to ScIrishSwimmer

    I reported them this over measurement situation. However with breaststroke you will always get faulty metrics, even if you keep your hands mostly near to the surface. Even with the watch just a bit underwater, the GPS signal gets lost, and re-finding it will be more difficult with breaststroke. So you were facing LOTS of GPS signal loss.

    As I noted earlier 20.04.2020, with GPS loss the watch keeps counting the distange from the signal of accelerometers (see pace chart, constant speed), and if it finds GPS signal again, it ADDS the distance between the last and new GPS points. It is annoying, but it works now like this.

    However you can report to Garmin the same issue ( [email protected] ), just to show them that it would be better to solve this. I recommended to choose between the accelerometer and GPS data, but not adding them both in case of GPS signal found again.