Open water GPS drifting

[CroShark]

After vacation update.

The watch performed much better than before, with the same firmware (latest) and startup procedure before swimming (update GNSS using the app and wait for a good signal before swimming).

There were no large deviations, only smaller ones. Roughly, I would say that the tracked distance is within +10% the real distance. I tested it on my usual swimming routes, so I know the distances in advance. But almost every swim had a absurdly top speed ( >30km/h). One swim had a record breaking top speed of 185.8 km/h

These performances are acceptable, for me who swims recreationally during the summer, but far from perfect or even ideal.
Hope the issue will be fixed with the next updates.

[EN AVANT]

I just bought a Suunto 9 Peak pro for having GPS while swimming in open Waters. After my first week swimming OW, the GPS stops suddenly. Is there a way to fix it?

[sky-runner]

@gerasimos I totally get it that it is my fault that the watch could not receive a clean GPS signal and there was an interference from water. However, my point was that instead of telling me that there is abnormal data it should silently buffer until it can get a higher quality data. It is always better to skip some unreliable data than to record a bad data. It was obvious that my position jumped 500 meters in a second, which is not humanly impossible. Why did it record that?

Showing me a notification and asking me to respond while I am swimming is a really poor user experience. I couldn’t possibly read that while swimming and didn’t know how to respond so I just waited until the message went away.

That reminds me of a fiasco I had with Suunto 9 Baro several years ago during a nigh race. As a result of my experience, shortly after that I switched to Garmin. During the race it lost good GPS satellite reception so it popped a notification asking me what do to - I guess whether I was going to pause and wait for the signal or continue, but I couldn’t read that because of that happening during a night and the text being small and my eyes not being so good with night vision anymore. The text looked blurry to me and I could not read it, so I didn’t know how to respond and was afraid to press a wrong button and stop recording. Second, because I was running hard with less than two miles remaining to the finish, I didn’t really want to stop and figure out what to do with the watch. It was terrible because the pop-up was obstructing all the data and not going away for like 10 minutes.

The point is, these watches should do the most reasonable thing without asking. A user may be racing or riding a bike on a challenging terrain, and not able to stop and respond.

[gerasimos]

@sky-runner Yeah, I get that GPS jump too, quite a few times actually, and it usually happens right at the end of the activity when I get out of the water and stop the watch.
Like in this example my last swim— I stopped it exactly where I started, but it added around 300m going up in the road… Super annoying when that happens, especially in a race. At this point showed me hitting max speed 374 km/h — I’m a swimming hovercraft dragster

[gerasimos]

Improvements and bug fixes:

-Improved swim style detection in pool swimming

-Improved accuracy with updated GNSS firmware

“Has anyone noticed any difference or improvement after the latest 2.44.46 update in open water swimming?”

[Ilya Zherikov 0]

@gerasimos I updated the firmware (the same 2.44.46 as for the Vertical) on my Race last week, and since then the open water tracks have been recorded much more accurately than before. And there are no sudden side jumps anymore!

[gerasimos]

@Ilya-Zherikov-0 very good news!!

[Theo Lakerveld]

Based on one single swim with the 2025 Q3 fw, I can confirm that there were no strange movements in the track. It looks that there can be an improvement

[Dimitrios Kanellopoulos]

@Ilya-Zherikov-0 been swimming with race 2 that should share the same fw correct me if wrong and had no drifts

[gerasimos]

@Dimitrios-Kanellopoulos Does it share the same GPS chip as the Vertical and the Race 1, apart from the software 2.44.46?

By the way a big bravo with Race 2 development