Poor GPS functioning on cycle

[mrbdamien]

I regularly cycle to work, and have used RunKeeper in the past to track my activity.  My journey is roughly 7.8 miles, as measured in Google Earth and in Runkeeper when creating a route.

Today I used my shiny new Blaze with connected GPS facility, only for it to tell me I had cycled 2.55 miles this morning and 2.26 miles on the way home. I have all location services and permissions set as they should be, and bluetooth sharing is on. My iPhone 6 is close to the Blaze. 

On the way home I used both Blaze and Runkeeper as a comparison just to check my phone GPS wasn't acting up, and I got these results.  The fitbit GPS functionality looks like it's not working quite like it should.

Runkeeper: 7.79 miles (pm only)

Fitbit Blaze: 2.55 miles (am) and 2.26 miles (pm)

Any suggestions or work-arounds would be helpful, don't really want to be taking the Blaze back to the shop. 

Thanks

[AngelaMa]

Welcome to the Fitbit Community @mrbdamien! 🙂 Thanks for your report about Connected GPS, our team is currenlty looking into this feature.  I would suggest to use MobileRun to track your activity, MobileRun calculates distance, elevation, and pace for your walk, run, or hike. When the activity is done and you sync your tracker, you'll find all the data and a GPS map of your route in your exercise history. 

Let me know if this helps! 🙂  

[Yaakovchaim]

I've noticed this too when I walk.  I'm doing mall walking and the discrepency can be anywhere from .3 miles to .1 miles.  And this is when I use the exercise feature on the Fitbit Blaze.

[RobbieA]

I can agree with what you say, like you I am using a Blaze and cycling to work, the route is 5 miles with Map my Ride but I get anything from 2 to 5 from the fitbit. I dug a bit into the data and it looks like the fitbit is stopping tracking when the GPS signal is lost and restarting when the signal is re-aquired and ignoring the bit in the middle. However it still draws the line on the map. Most tracking apps will draw a straight line from signal loss to re_aquire and assume (quite rightly) you have done that bit. If you look at the graphs on the dashboard and set the axis from distance to time you may see sections showing 0 speed when you know you were moving. Fitbit I think you need a software change to the tracking to allow for GPS signal loss it is unrealistic to expect a perfect GPS signal all the time.

[GC64]

I find the GPS on my walk works fine but I encounter the same problem when cycling.  

Having to use two devices to track your rides seems to be defeating the purpose of having a Blaze watch.

Based on the previous posts, this has been an ongoing problem.  If the GPS works fine for the walks it seems to me it should work equally well with the cycling.  A fix for this would be a great motivator to stick with the Blaze.