I am pretty satisfied with my VA3, but right now I see some distance error. Today I participate in running competition - 10km. My VA3 measured 9,64km :/ On Sunday I was running and regarding our map server mapy.cz) distance was about 10,4km, but my VA3 measured 10km. Looks like there is 350/360m error. It is only me who has this error? Maybe it is from last update (not sure). If so, should I wait for another update or return VA3 and hope it will work with new ones.
Yeah, for some reasons, it seems that the VA3 GPS tends to underestimate (running?) distances. A certain error is to be expected, as GPS measurements are always a bit noisy, but this means that sometimes we should see runs that are slightly longer, together with some that are shorter than the real distance. In principle, however, the final error should be minimal, as noisy measurements should compensate each other (assuming white, Gaussian noise, which it seems to be a fair assumption).
Yes, it also happens to me that the VA3 always marks less distance than the real one, that is to say it influences both the speed and the current rhythm. For example, yes it is certain that I am at a rate of 5m / km the VA3 shows 5:05m / km And in my case (Argentina), activating GLONASS makes the difference even worse. The difference of the GLONASS is that you have greater reception (less loss of satellites), which is not the same as greater precision. Using footpod improves the accuracy a bit, but 9.64km in front of 10km is a 4% error.
I don't agree with your distance measurement errors. I get pretty good measures. Are you sure race distance is accurate? Did you compare with other runners' watches?
I still think it has to do something with update, because until now, it was OK. I will try it today also with my phone and get back to this topic with results.
@JACalvo:Only comparison I have right now is with apple watch series 3. Running competition was evaluated as 10km for other runners, so has to be something with my VA3.
@TheVoid:For competition I used also GPS+GLONASS and instead of 10km I had 9,64km.
@TMK17: I did want to run with my cellphone (iP SE) and right now GPS is better there? :/ Gosh.
That was a very interesting article..... thanks for the link.
It is interesting and fairly consistent that i reported earlier i was having about a -4% accuracy issue; the OP reports about a -3.6% accuracy issue and the link showed a 5-6% accuracy issue. I'm pretty surprised with this amount of inaccuracy from Garmin.
I too get roughly 4% deviation and that error was introduced with the 4.40 GPS FW update last week.
My usual park run used to get 0,91-0,92 km/lap, whereas after the update I get 0,88-0,89 km/lap. Precision (spread) is quite spot on, but something happened with accuracy (bias) after the update...
Distance measurement on Google Maps gives 0,915 km, which means that the GPS were better before the update!
Edit: Up until now I’ve used GPS+Glonass, but tonight I’ll try with GPS only to see if it makes any difference.
I'm pretty surprised with this amount of inaccuracy from Garmin.
Same here. I stumbled upon this article after doing a Google search. A while back the wife wanted to go on a run with me. We ran side by side the entire route and saw the different GPS tracks between my 935 and her VA3. We tested it again twice. Once running together again and the other with me wearing both watches. Each time the GPS were quite different. So, I've come to three possible conclusions. 1. The watches are using different GPS parts or technology (unlikely). 2. The placement of the antennae in the watches is affecting the readings (possible). The third and what I feel is the most probable (based on speculation from other people using other Garmin watches with a similar design) is the alloy bezel is affecting the signal strength in the VA3.
Saw this and had to comment on it, my wife and I got one VA3 each a week ago and have seen that we get an deviation around -3,5-4% in distance on our usual lap with a known length of 6.85 km And interesting is that when we compare our readings afterwards regarding distance the difference between our VA3 is only 10 m on the whole lap. Both VA3 has the latest update software on them.
