Hiking with the Vivosport

Hi henochg,

In holiday times, I use the Vivosport regularly for hiking (daytrips). Apart from heart rates (which is a known problem) it seems fine.
I mainly use steps, altitude, distance and GPS tracker.
And verify with 2 smartphones. All are within 5%.

Can you indicate which of your numbers are deviating?

Interesting, I have only used it twice.and both  times it was way off, I did a 3.5 mile hike and it showed 1.5 miles.

1.5 instead of 3.5 is indeed way off.
Some things that may have an influence, although not enough to explain the deviation you mention:

• Did you have many trees that may have blocked the "view" to the satellites?
• Did you use GPS on walking, running or biking settings? They differ in the "mustering speed" and tracking details.
  The slower you move, the more precise the tracking is.
• Did you do a lot of altitude changes? I'm not sure how they are handled.
  Maybe the Vivosport just uses the X and Y (on flat surface) to calculate your track length?
• I noticed in areas with less than optimal GPS coverage (high buildings / dense trees,.etc.) it matters if your track is straight or if you're having loads of corners.
  In corners, the Vivosport doesn't seem to be as precise as it should be. It does not get all of the points and guesses that you've moved in straight lines from one recognised point to the next.
  Of course on more or less straight paths this does not matter too much.
• Further, I noticed that the "auto pause" feature sometimes is too slow in restarting after a pause. You will see longer straight lines in your mapped track, where in reality you may have walked corners.
  You may want to experiment with pausing and restarting the tracking manually.

Still in warranty?

So yes there was lots of tree/foliage coverage, but isn't that where most hiking takes place? I was in the forest on hiking trails.

I am pretty sure that I had it on the walking setting, I can't recall what the altitude was, but there was lots of up/down.

I did have the auto pause on, so that might be a culprit, but even so it was so bad that it seemed pretty useless for any hiking usage at all.

In your case I think I would go contact the Garmin service / aftersales department to find out what your options are.
I wish you all the best.

Did you find your problem ? I would like to buy the Vivoactive but I don't know if it works fine while hiking. I have the Fitbit charge 3 and when I use my hiking sticks, the number of steps and the distance does not make sens at all ! (But I know it's not "made" for that kind of exercice). But I'm scare to have the same issu with other watches.

Garmin had put a notification about "Activity Tracking Accuracy" on my Garmin Connect website, which points to this: https://www.garmin.com/en-US/legal/atdisclaimer/.

I don't know if the notification was already there before...

I can't say that I definitely figured it out, I have only been hiking one time since I posted this, I turned off auto pause and the results seemed very good, however it was also in the winter so the trees had no leaves which may have also helped.