Poor GPS performance (compared to Race S)
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There may well be some form of calculation bug going on but, honestly, sometimes GNSS is just going to be like this. Summer is harder because of the increased leaf cover on trees and at certain times of day and days of the month you are going to find the orbits of the satellites are not as optimal as others. Every watch will have a different antenna design so will have different good and bad times/days. For actual races this is why Suunto have snap-to-route.
Honestly it amazes me how the engineers manage to squeeze the accuracy they do out of modern GNS systems - a tiny antenna strapped to a moving person listening out for the faintest radio time signals from multiple transmitters 20,000km above the earth that are themselves moving at approx 14,000 km/h and extracting a useable data stream from all the reflections and interference before then crunching through sub-millisecond accurate complex 3-dimensional triangulation maths to work out your position in space to within 1m - repeatedly, multiple times a second.
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@far-blue - I could not agree more! Perfection does not exist and from what I have seen (a race and vertical owner) the performance between the two devices is largely accurate and comparable.
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@EzioAuditore This is an interesting feedback, thanks! Possibly your Ocean and my wife’s Race S have not built up that level of error yet. Will perform a reset now and then…
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@far-blue as an engineer I understand your point and definetly appreciate the snap to route feature as I was using map matching algorithm as backup solution for my positioning algorithm developed during my master thesis.
Nevertheless, I experienced a drop in accuracy of my Race that has been constantly outperformed by my wife’s Race S. Possibly this is a “simple” bug that can be cleared rebooting the device here and then as recommended above, but would love to get it fixed to further improved the amazing whatch I wear everyday.
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Perfection is not what I am expecting but honestly upon looking closely to the map examples given above, at least in my case, the tracking is poor. Not even satisfactory. The first half of the run tracking is terrible which I cannot understand from a good quality smartwatch. I hope it’s a bug that can be fixed in upcoming firmware updates (there was one just released, let’s see!).
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everytime I am not sync app before activity GPS is not good This is a very annoying problem.
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@NM_gent
If you have so bad results, no-one can exclude some hardware issue in your watch (antenna, or chipset).
Recontact the support and maybe ask for a RMA. -
or it’s just bad satellite coverage.
that’s where agps helps a lot -
Update from next activity:
I have been out for a running activity again following almost the same route as before. In the meantime, a firmware update has been released and I performed the update. Additionally, I have followed the advise from Suunto website’s FAQ and replies in this post: performing a soft reset on the watch and making sure I have synced the watch with the phone before the activity.
This time the GPS tracking was nearly spot on.
I will keep checking in the coming activities to see how this progresses. Thank you all for the inputs.
