I am getting angry ???????? with the constant craziness in Elevation Data. I run in flat park by the sea and it gets me several meters underwater and several meters flying!!! PLEASE GARMIN LET US DISABLE ABC ALTOGETHER
I have had the same problem with two Garmin Devices. The issue started with my Vivoactive 3 around October/Nov and last week, I replaced my Vivoactive 3 with FR645 and the issue has not disappeared. There is atleast 30% error in the altitude measurement. I usually wait 30 seconds after the watch has acquired GPS in order to complete calibration. But this does not help. As someone suggested, my next step would be to try to acclimatize the watch for 15 mins by not covering my watch with sleeves and start running only 15 mins after the watch is exposed to the outside air. Garmin has to find a solution to this before people start moving to other watches. What is really surprising is, all the people who review watches in detail in youtube and their blogs have not mentioned a word about this issue. Does it mean they are conveniently ignoring this because they are paid? or it is just that they don't have this issue in any of the Garmin watches that they have reviewed? It is really amusing that they don't have issues in the watches they review because almost everyone I have spoken to have complains about their Garmin on elevation issue.
Garmin replaced my 645 as I kept pestering on my initial support request. Needless to say the replacement behaves pretty much the same. Oh well at least they tried. Probably means it's either a s/w issue or a design flaw.
I have had the same problem with two Garmin Devices. The issue started with my Vivoactive 3 around October/Nov and last week, I replaced my Vivoactive 3 with FR645 and the issue has not disappeared. There is atleast 30% error in the altitude measurement. I usually wait 30 seconds after the watch has acquired GPS in order to complete calibration. But this does not help. As someone suggested, my next step would be to try to acclimatize the watch for 15 mins by not covering my watch with sleeves and start running only 15 mins after the watch is exposed to the outside air. Garmin has to find a solution to this before people start moving to other watches. What is really surprising is, all the people who review watches in detail in youtube and their blogs have not mentioned a word about this issue. Does it mean they are conveniently ignoring this because they are paid? or it is just that they don't have this issue in any of the Garmin watches that they have reviewed? It is really amusing that they don't have issues in the watches they review because almost everyone I have spoken to have complains about their Garmin on elevation issue.
I think the problem with a lot of these YouTube reviews including DC Rainmaker is that they rush to get them online as soon as they get their hands on a pre-release model. I don't think they test them extensively on different days. It's all very well group testing different devices, but you need to run the tests day after day and look for irregularities in the data. With regards to the altimeter you also need to have knowledge of elevation data from published maps so you have accurate data to compare against.
One thing I have noticed with the 645M is that the elevation is completely false when you are starting and stopping an activity several times during a run, such as an interval session. I have done interval sessions on a flat 400m track that showed over 300ft of elevation gain. And the start/finish elevations are almost always off, which is a sure sign that something is amiss.
Did a cycling activity yesterday & a running activity this morning on the same course. Cycling elevation graph was pancake flat, running one was jagged all the way. Impressively both distances were identical at 3.65km. This forum s/w is dire as it keeps logging me out & won't allow me upload any pics. Anyway I've sent both fit files to garmin support so maybe they'll investigate (or not!).
For anyone else experience this, don't bother with Garmin's replacement suggestion as makes no difference.
I take back what I said, Garmin have opened a support case, presumably with the development side of things, for this issue. Maybe they'll be able to get to the bottom of what's going on.
It's been three weeks since I last heard from support so I sent them a reminder & got the feedback that there was no feedback. Imagine the engineering people are busy with the about to be released 245 & 945 :) I'll try again in three weeks.
Has anyone received any updates on this? This has started to annoy me quite a lot, altitude is all over the place. Anyone tried to complain so much that they get their money back?
