Suunto 9 Baro football run distance in km

freeheeler

@Alexbg
suunto is made for the highest mountains and the deepest oceans… no one mentions the greenest soccerfield

what FW do you have installed? and could you make your activity public and share it?

I think the tracking has improved a lot since the FW update, but it really depends also on buildings around the stadium

freeheeler

@Alexbg
check this out: between km 3 and 4 I ran around a tree and even with new FW the watch did not recognize it.
I think the S9B chip is less sensitive than the one from A3PS… but therefore might use less energy which is good for most mountain sports but not ideal for field sports.

https://quantified-self.io/user/jBm0qOhihUMykVYD8HBJMshQrJc2/event/A60PtzTC8ofZ20ZyQpqZ

Alexbg

Here is a link to my latest football training: https://www.sports-tracker.com/workout/alex840541/5dd6c2eca65c74d6bd478d7c

If Suunto made the watch only for the highest mountains, they SHOULD NOT commercial it as a watch with 80 sports activities!!!
Simply can delete 79 of them and leave only mountain running

freeheeler

@Alexbg
SA and the watch also say 3km?

Alexbg

Yes, Suunto App and the watch also say 3km. Latest software is installed. Done reboots several times. Read everything available on the net on GPS refresh timing and GPS accuracy. Didn’t found a solution so far.
By the way even in other sport modes (running/cycling) GPS refresh rate never has been 1 second despite always using performance mode.

freeheeler

@Alexbg said in Suunto 9 Baro football run distance in km:

GPS refresh rate never has been 1 second

how can you look this up? I don’t find this and I always use performance with GPS only.

soccer with distance vs steps is hard for me to tell, but it is a sprint sport with small steps between. i can imagine from what i know about S9B accuracy so far that it is hard to handle soccer for the watch.

Alexbg

On GPS refresh rate - I’m looking at the graph in Suunto App or Sports Tracker and check time difference between points on the map. Is there other way to do it?

On the Suunto 9 Baro GPS accuracy it is a shame that top Suunto product find it difficult to perform. Have a friends with competitor sport watches and one of them with Suunto Spartan Ultra. All of them tracked approximately same amount of steps as me, but higher run distance between 5 and 6 km. It is strange how Spartan Ultra works fine, but Suunto 9 not.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m trying to help Suunto.

freeheeler

@Alexbg
I never use sports tracker… it is not correct for altitude values and has actually nothing to do with SA…
I’ll check SA for the refresh rate.

I see it as a challenge for watch makers to setup a watch that does the split between long batterylife, high accuracy and no nervous track recording. but this should be a default setting for each sportmode…

freeheeler

@Alexbg said in Suunto 9 Baro football run distance in km:

I’m looking at the graph in Suunto App

now I saw it on my latest activity when i zoomed in extremely on the graph… one point every 4 seconds… but sometimes also every second. seems to be dynamic

Alexbg

Yes, Suunto said it should refresh GPS every 1 second on performance mode! That is how they commercial the product.
Based on my experience using the watch for running, cycling and football the watch GPS refresh rate varies between 1 second and more than 30 second in some occasions. Not good enough for the money spent.

surfboomerang

I noticed that different sport modes have different intervals. Probably to save battery.

For example: if I select Windsurfing or Other as sports mode, I get a GPS point every second in performance mode. If I select a running sports mode I see a recording interval of a few (3 or 4) seconds. The gaps between are probably filled by their FusedTrack technology.

I think it would be nice to have an override option in the settings to set the recording interval for the activity, because different people have different needs but unfortunately this is not an option at the moment.

freeheeler

@surfboomerang
the manual says fusedtrack will only (?) be active in running and trailrunning when endurance or ultra batterymode is selected.

you’re right, there should be a superperformance mode that actually records every 1sec for people that use it. For my sports it is good as it is, but I can imagine some people need it with higher precision

Dimitrios Kanellopoulos

Hi,

this is simple to solve. You are mostly static on the field and there is no GPS location update if you just move lets say 3m and then back. That is to avoid static.

Steps are not related to this. GPS and steps are decoupled.

freeheeler

@Dimitrios-Kanellopoulos
because of this S9B does not do nervous recordings when I do a small pause without hitting the pause button, since the new FW update… hence it does not count extra distance that the user actually did not walk

for hiking, running, biking, skitouring etc this is perfect, but maybe not for footballers…

Dimitrios Kanellopoulos

@TELE-HO correct my friend. Although as you said it depends on the “action” and distance from previous point for example. In short, I think, if you dont move out like 3-5m from that place that you are it wont record / increase the distance if the pace is low. If not it will.

That is for Static detection

Alexbg

Thanks a lot for the feedback.

However still it seems unclear how Suunto Spartan Ultra and other brand watches tracked same amount of steps, but higher run distance.
Is it something wrong with the software of Suunto 9 Baro?
Is the GPS hardware/software of Suunto 9 worst than Spartan?

Alexbg

That football tracking distance bug just doesn’t give a break. So I go deeper. Suunto App/Sports Tracker gives you a possibility to extract raw data from your watch in FIT (the former app) and in GPX format (the latter app). I found very useful the GPX data. It is very easy to analyze it. Simply open the GPX file with notepad and you see the following pattern for each GPS point:
</trkpt>
<trkpt lat=“42.68561” lon=“23.33532”>
<ele>568.0</ele>
<time>2019-11-24T15:24:27Z</time>
<extensions>
gpxtpx:TrackPointExtension
gpxtpx:hr94</gpxtpx:hr>
</gpxtpx:TrackPointExtension>
</extensions>
</trkpt>
where: lat is Latitude; lon is Longitude; ele is Elevation; time is the time stamp of the GPS refresh point; hr is hart rate;
As far as I read over the net FIT format gives you the possibility to record even more data.
As the GPX file is XML it can be opened in Excel and read in much more user friendly way.

In order to calculate the distance the watch and the apps get the latitude, longitude, (if they want to precise the elevation too) between two time stamps and using a formula calculate the distance.

What I observe in the GPX file is that I have a GPS time stamp every second, BUT the GPS coordinates (latitude and longitude) are the same for a set of data and changes randomly.
Puzzled with this I tried to measure the distance between each change of GPS. I do it on the web with free access Coordinate Distance Calculator. The first ten changes which I checked appeared after distance between to GPS points is exactly 10 meters.

This means that to get an update of your GPS coordinates you need to move at least 10m, i.e. if you move 8m forwards and 8m backwards you will get 0 distance covered.

Lets go back to football. If you play in a field with a size 44m long, 22m wide and you play as midfielder, than you can do countless amount of steps (measured by the accelerator) and negligible run distance.
Now lets go to tennis (one of the 80 sport available on the Suunto 9 Baro). The tennis field split by half (for 1 player) is 12m long and 8m wide. Probably it is better to delete tennis as an option on the watch?!? And there are many other sports: Volleyball, Squash, Ice hockey, Handball and etc., and etc.

Probably this explains the cut corners in sports like running and cycling.

I think this needs a FIX!!! Probably much shorter distance for GPS coordinates refresh or at least a software option to do it if you want.

I’m attaching my GPX file, but you can always check yours. Let me know your thoughts. Thanks.
11_21_19 17_52.gpx

Dimitrios Kanellopoulos

@Alexbg hi this is not correct approach to debug an issue. Gpx data are extrapolated / interpolated and are from another service.

Also your watch uses fused distance and speed it doesn’t obey only to GPS. GPS is there to help only.

Here is an activity with the latest fw showing back and forth 10m increments.

https://app.suunto.com/move/dimitrioskanellopoulos/5da20b6b58e211b29b61bc01

And another one.

https://app.suunto.com/move/dimitrioskanellopoulos/5da1da0da6957b4b299b914a

What I suspecting is that you use a sport mode without fused distance and that might be a bug if you used football.

I agree with the 10 meter assessment. That is the same that I observed when looking at FIT files from my Suunto 9 (from running and trail running activities). It appears distance and coordinate updates usually come with at least 10 meter intervals, sometimes greater than that, but rarely less than 10 meters.

Alexbg

@silentvoyager Thanks for sharing your experience on the topic. Only this way Suunto may take steps to fix the bug.

@Dimitrios-Kanellopoulos I greatly appreciate your feedback.
On fused distance - do you mean Fused Track? If not please can you share with me how can I activate fused distance on my Suunto 9 Baro.
If you refer to Fused Track as far as I read it is activated automatically when you switch to Ultra or Endurance battery mode. As I mentioned above I always use Performance mode, because I want best tracking data.

On using GPX file to analyze the problem I go even further. I want to analyze every single distance between two GPS refresh points for a particular exercise. I download FIT file from Suunto App and use https://www.gpsvisualizer.com/ to convert it to plain TXT file. Open the file in Excel. It has the following structure:

I calculate the distance in meters between two GPS points using the following formula:
=ACOS(COS(RADIANS(90-C2)) *COS(RADIANS(90-C3)) +SIN(RADIANS(90-C2)) *SIN(RADIANS(90-C3)) *COS(RADIANS(D2-D3))) *6371000
Everyone who is interested can find more info on the formula on the internet.

And finally I run a histogram statistics on the data.

So it appears that in this particular run 55% of the GPS refresh points are more than 8m away one from the next.
I run the same analysis on several other tracks (walking, cycling and football) showing the same statistics.
So if most of the GPS point coordinates are refreshed when distance is larger than 8-10 meters, that will make the watch unusable for large part of the 80 sports activities pre-set on it.

Please check your own tracks and share your experience.

Performance has a difference meanings. For one person it means more than 100 hours battery endurance, BUT for others it means precision/perfection in tracking. Suunto should give all customers setting on the watch to choose what they want based on their needs.