Mileage does not accurately record elevation or mileage

[Jake73]

So I used my Blaze mountain biking the other night. I went on a trail that I know has over 1200 feet of elevation gain and is over 9 miles. I selected bike as my exercise and connected to my phone. I know that on parts of the trail there is no cell service. At the end of my ride I checked my blaze and it said my ride had 320 feet of elevation gain and was only 4.5 miles. I was very dissapointed to see this. When I got home I checked the app closer and even though it accurately mapped my route it only showed minimal elevation gain and it was on 4.5 miles.

So I guess in reality the Blaze is just a flashy step tracker and not really capable of being used by serious runners and bikers. Dissapointing.

[hikebikerun]

It pulls GPS from your phone so if you lose phone it loses GPS tracking. 

However I find the lack of elevation tracking in the APP frustrating and it's accuracy highly lacking. Mileage wise I'm not having any real issues on rides, I've been on an up and back down ride for the past 3 weeks and I stop and restart at my turnaround point. This is in the mountains and the mileage difference between the up and down trips has been within .2-.3 miles over a total of 21 miles, 10.5 up and 10.5 down. 

Altitude tracking is horrible with hiking and biking though. The graph you can see on the actual website data shows correct but the elevation total in the corner will be completely off. For example on my ride this Sunday the graph shows the correct up slope of just under 1000 feet. The total in the corner says 90 feet of elevation. I also feel that the elevation display should be a part of the activity summary in the APP, not just available on the website. 

[jwebb72]

The Blaze doesn't need cell service for GPS connect, and yes, accuracy has been a problem for a lot of us, very frustrating.

[hikebikerun]

As I understand the function of the Blaze it is using the phones GPS for tracking. Depending on the make and model of phone GPS tracking accuracy is reduced when there is no cell reception. My HTC will still generally get a pretty good GPS signal most of the time even without cell service. My old S3 was spotty at best if I was in the mountains with no cell service.

[Bikewerks]

I have the same problem. The elevation on my Fitbit dashboard is not even close to the actual amount that I have ridden. However, when the data gets pushed to my Strava account the elevation numbers are correct. How two site can interpret the same data differently makes no sense.

[Rich_Laue]

Does anyone know how Strava displays the data?

While displaying yhe data from an event, Fitbit does average the pace, elavation, and calories to blocks of 60 seconds. If Strava displays the data in a different block of time, say of 1, 10, or 15 seconds, these numbers will be drastically different.

Looking at the way the numbers are calculated in each app, neither one is invorrect, but the figures need to be interpreted in a different way.

However not knowing how Strava calculates their final numbers, we can't really do a one to one compare the data, and if they calculate them differently a direct compare can not be done.

Unlike some 3rd party apps that dont get the complete data sent to them, Strava does, and they are able to minipulate the way they do the final display. 

I also have a question about the title of this thread which clearly states both elavation and distance is off, but nowhere in the body of the message is a distance mentioned. Something is kinda misleading, and confusing here.

Sort of the same thing as when looking at the data between Fitbit and Strava, it is not so obvious as to how things are behind the scene. Especially when elevation is measured in feet, not miles.