@runyx17 said:
Reading about these problems here makes me worry if it will ever be fixed at all.
I think the main problem is that Suunto navigation doesn’t simply guide you though a planned route. It continuously guesses where you want to go based on your current position. I think, internally there are invisible “checkpoints” along the route that you must pass for the watch to determine that you are on-route. Based on what the checkpoint that you passed last it draws the light blue arrows pointing you toward the next checkpoint. The reason I think it works this way is because these light blue arrows sometimes lag behind and then jump forward. In my example the route goes over itself twice for a short distance so there would be two checkpoints from different distances. When the watch sees the one from the later distance, it probably decides at that point that I have already skipped a part of the route, so it simply shows the light blue arrows based on where it thinks I am and not where I should be according to the planned route. This is a subtle but important difference. And because of that sometimes it randomly reverses the direction. There may be a momentary GPS glitch, and it readily accepts that, assuming that I started moving in the opposite direction.
Also, Garmin handles routes where Suunto fails much better.
I know exactly how Garmin navigation works because I helped them to fix a bug a few years ago where Garmin navigation would repeatedly go off route at sharp nearly 180 degree turns. The way I helped is that I kept hammering them with bug reports on their forum and produced simple and detailed repro steps. I was in communication with one of their reps and and eventually they had fixed it.
Garmin has similar invisible “checkpoints” on route that I described above - perhaps every 30-50 meters or so. While you are on route you are expected to move towards the next checkpoint. Once you passed that - move to the next one, and so on. Garmin navigation makes sure you stick to the route as a sequence of these checkpoints in the exact order as planned. If course, if you intentionally skipped a part of the route it would tell you that you went off route. Then it would recapture you later on the route. But it doesn’t do that proactively and without letting the user know as Suunto does it.
And this is exactly how Suunto should do that. Even if there is still an auto-reversal logic, you should do the best effort to stick to the original route, and only when that fails, show the notification, and only then after some distance of going off the original route, try to recapture it. That would give user a chance to correct themselves if they mistakenly went off route or cut a part of it, or reversed direction.
