Suunto 7 vs Garmin 645 Track Distance
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I recently went mtn biking with my brother who has a 645. We rode the same distance, started and stopped our watches at the same time.
His distance: 16.2
My distance: 14.65A pretty significant difference about 10%. I looked further into each of our tracks and found in a few instances my S7 had cut a few corners. One is showing below (S7 in Red, 645 in Purple). The trail we were on is mostly covered in trees and bench cut from the side of a hill. I was not surprised to see a little track differences but some of the corners that the S7 cut were pretty large. There are some other smaller deviations but it is hard to believe that all of those small deviations add up to 1.5 miles.
I was using the 1s GPS Time interval and he was as well.
My watch was on my right wrist, his was on his left. Considering the track had previously recorded a closer position I would assume that shouldn’t have played a major part.
Has anyone seen anything like this before?
I am running the latest software and just restarted the watch this morning.
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For anyone who is interested, here are the two GPX files. I am parsing through them in the GPS Track Editor tool. I know the total distance of single track so I am planning to split each of the gpx files into loops and checking those against what the distance should be.
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@tfinster were both watches on the same arm? Typically if you wear them at different arms one cuts corners while the other overshoots
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@dimitrios-kanellopoulos I think a more detailed test needs to be done. My S7 was on my right wrist and his 645 was on his left. It also likely does not help that both watches were not on one persons arm. The trail is very narrow single track so we were likely on the trail within a foot of each other.
This trail is nearly all in the woods and goes along a ridgeline that is likely a worst case GPS condition.
The biggest surprise at the end of the ride was the 10% difference in distance.
