Ionic GPS Inaccuracies

[MP4]

Hi, 

I'm a new Fitbit user, bought an Ionic on Monday and I'm having some issues with the GPS. Went on a couple of runs (at a track) and the gps seemed to be completely out both on the distance travelled and pace per kilometre.

I'm a long time strava user so yesterday I went for a run with both the Fitbit Ionic going and the strava on my iPhone running at the same time. Here are the results:

Strava - 7.9km   @ 4:15/km

Fitbit - 7.2km     @ 4:34/km

The difference of 0.7km is quite big and the difference in pace is also worrying. I waited till both had connected to gps before starting the run and I run in London where gps signal should be good. 

Is my Fitbit Ionic GPS not working correctly? Any help/advice would be appreciated. 

Thanks

Matt

Moderator Edit: Updated Subject for Clarity

[imeson79]

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@SantiR wrote:

Hello everyone! I hope you're all doing well. Thanks for your continuous participation on this thread regarding Ionic's distance when tracking a GPS activity. 

Our team has received the feedback from everyone in this thread and is working to investigate these reports further. I will share updates from the team when I hear them.

Thanks for your patience and understanding. Keep me posted! 

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Confirm 4 me it is and works brilliantly, bad news is it doesn't record the map or save it i believe

[groberge]

As far as I can tell, this app only tracks in km so it basically won't work for anyone in America and it will only do live tracking to the phone using map my tracks or something like that. 

If you just want us to check and see if the hardware GPS works,  I'll do that but I'll have to use a whole other app to track in km.  All of this testing for your engineers should earn us a paycheck. 

[bmw54]

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@SantiR wrote:

Additionally, have you tried the JayPS app? This app will also track GPS activities and will give stats like instant speed, average speed, distance, altitude, and heart rate. Could you install this app and give it a try? Please let me know if the data it will give is accurate.

Thanks for your patience and understanding. Keep me posted! 

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Strange coincidence, I just noticed and downloaded JayPS this morning and was initially interested. But after seeing there was no way to change the km/h to minutes/mile and that it wouldn't sync my run to the Fitbit phone app and that I'd need additional software it seemed like another piece of untested software. 

I feel as if I've already spent enough time testing faulty software (my Ionic) for no apparent purpose.

So I removed the app.

[Denodan]

We should not be beat testers for your products. It is obvious that the ionic was a failure so bought out the cheaper new on with no GPS  on board as you guys can clearly not get GPS to work correctly on the ionic with many people.

[groberge]

Although the JayPS App completely sucks, I was able to test with it and had the results that I was expecting.

I used Runkeeper on my phone to compare and the Runkeeper said that I ran 7.28km while the JayPS (which seems to only show to the tenths place) showed 7.3km.  The display of the JayPS App leaves a lot to be desired as does any intuitive usage so once I got it tracking I didn't touch anything to try and see my current pace.

At the same time, I used Strava to track the same run using the Imperial measurements and it ended up at 4.6 miles.  It was a little longer than the other two due to the fact that I stopped Strava last and kept running until they were all stopped.

This seems to prove, once again, that this is not a hardware issue and is a software issue with the way that the Ionic software is interpreting the data.

[Denodan]

How do you even know your phone is accurate? It's funny how people compare their phones to the ionic or any others smart watch, even phones vary when it comes to GPS and weather and solar activity will make GPS very by quite some margin.

[groberge]

Because I've run many official races with it and it's always been very close to the actual distance of the race.  I've also tracked many routes to run and the phone has always been accurate.

[bbarrera]

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@Denodan wrote:

How do you even know your phone is accurate? It's funny how people compare their phones to the ionic or any others smart watch, even phones vary when it comes to GPS and weather and solar activity will make GPS very by quite some margin.

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@Denodan Why do you think the phone is so inaccurate? I have hundreds of rides tracked on two phones (iPhone 5s and iPhone 7), using RideWithGPS app and putting phone into airplane mode. In parallel I also tracked with my GPS bike computer. In 99 out of 100 cases, the two are within 1% of each other. 

edit:

Here is a ride comparing phone GPS to bike computer GPS, showing >1% (1.1) difference:

phone GPS: https://ridewithgps.com/trips/7992776

Edge 520 GPS: https://ridewithgps.com/trips/7995223

And here is a ride comparing phone vs bike, showing a more typical <1% (0.77) difference:

phone GPS: https://ridewithgps.com/trips/9214305

Edge 520 GPS: https://ridewithgps.com/trips/9190458

[TomDNA]

To check the Ionic GPS, visit the Olympic track at your local college and
walk or run one or more laps on the inside lane, which is 400 meters and
equals 1,312.3 feet or a couple of feet less than 0.25 mile. You can use
also these data to calculate stride length.

[Tex52]

@Denodan

I know my phone was accurate compared to my Ionic and other devices because I run on routes or trails that are known distances. Ionic GPS sucks and not sure why people want to take up for them.

[scottdl51]

I just want to add my disappointment with the Iconic GPS.  My surge consistently mapped my walks at the same distance for the past 18 months.  The first use of the Iconic over the same course came up considerably shorter.  I'll try the suggestions posted but it seems like I'm expected to fix Fitbits issues or live with them...

[dorst622]

I have run with ionic using GPS. The distance is serious off the chart. 10km distance is only clock at 8.7km, 21km is clock at 18.7km. Anyway to improve the accuracy. BTW I am very sure the GPS show connected before I start the run. 

[SunsetRunner]

Hello everyone 

I set my watch to outdoor cycle, waited for GPS to connect, then set off. Upon finishing my ride, I synced to the app - but it just shows the route as a straight line across the map - not being what I rode. On my old surge I used to get a detailed map, and also KM Splits. I also used to get a graph with my speed variations - but now it just gives me an average speed. Can anyone advise? Thanks in advance 

[BahGahWah]

Ran with the new firmware version today.  No improvement with the 5km run recorded as 4.8km. 

The last two runs the heart rate monitoring has stopped recording / working midway through the run.  

[SunsetRunner]

To be honest, I'd be very surprised if they fix this now. They might
improve the algorithm a little bit so that it makes more accurate guesses
as to speed and distance, but I can't imagine they're going to start using
the gps instead of steps all of a sudden. I assume there must be a reason
they're using steps as it's not the obvious solution, but as they've
refused to get one of the engineers on this thread to explain the situation
then I've basically given up on Fitbit. It's probably the worst purchase
I've ever made - and poor customer service too - and that's coming from
someone who was very keen on fitbit for the couple of years preceding this
product. I basically wanted a good fitness tracker, the rest of the apps
don't work very well, are a bit pointless or aren't really relevant in the
uk - or all three, but I wouldn't have cared if the exercise apps worked as
expected.

[Denodan]

You are never going to get accurate distance measured on steps, no matter what watch your using, even strides will not be accurate as it assumes we are doing perfect strides or steps the same distance everytime which we are no. Wind, conditions, how tried, etc yoy are all effect steps and stride and as humans as we are not robots the steps and strides will every every day through conditions your in and how energetic you are.

[SunsetRunner]

Though that makes sense, of course, the distance measured on my parkrun
actually is reasonably consistent, but it consistently underestimates. Now,
assuming fitbit gps data is actually correct, even though it's using steps,
then it's not a big deal for the running app to actually look at previous
performance and correct accordingly. For example, if I were writing an
algorithm for fitbit then I certainly wouldn't use a fixed stride length,
I'd actually make it dependent on cadence too - I think when people slow
down they usually reduce cadence and stride length at the same time. Of
course running up and down hill adds problems. Whatever fitbit's algorithm
actually does, is actually a little more complicated than step count
multiplied by step length, or at least, if that is what it does then it is
using a sophisticated approach to calculating step length. If you check
the details of your runs, then this is probably apparent, if you do runs at
different speeds.

[Denodan]

There is no way a watch will be accurate using stride and steps.

[SunsetRunner]

Or you could read my post

[chnelson]

The last two days Fitbit Ionic was taking over 10 minutes to try to connect to gps. Yesterday I started my run without the connection and the run measurement appeared fairly accurate. Today I did the same and the run information is garbage. It accounts for 1.5 miles run when I ran 5 miles and the map is worthless. This is the first time I have had such  serious gps problems. On the heels of last weeks Stava problems I am very close to ditching the Ionic if these quirks are not fixed soon.