GPS and exercise

[SConway]

My wife and I like to do our exercises together. We both start a "walk" exercise on our watches when we walk at local parks. We have same exact watch (Versa 2) and the exact same phone (Galaxy S8).

When the exercise is completed, her map shows the exact path we walked, while my GPS shows erratic arbitrary lines that aren't even close to path we walked (see https://ibb.co/cL0JkrG ). As you can see from that image, according to the geo lines, I am literally walking on water at one time. Also, there's anywhere between a 1/4 miles to a 1/2 mile discrepancy between the distances, depending on the walk itself. The longer we walk, the more of a discrepancy.

Our hardware is set up identically, as far as I know. The only difference that I am aware of is that I have my long-button press set up for music controls, which means my phone's bluetooth is pair to Versa2 (Classic). I cannot see how this would affect reading my phone's geo-location information.

I am looking for any ideas, but also, is there any way to simply get the watch to measure using GPS only, ignoring stride length and all that mess? Apparently, this issue is above my pay-grade.

[Marrrmaduke · Accepted solution]

@SConway Your Versa depends on Bluetooth connection for GPS data as it uses the GPS on your phone. The bluetooth connection has to be stable otherwise the GPS signal will be lost and you will see the straight lines on the map. Depending on your phone model and OS, using the bluetooth classic while trying to use connected GPS may pose issues. In the same way as having other devices (headphones) connected can. Please try without music control ON and let me know how it goes.

ETA: Re stride length, Versa uses both GPS and stride length to calculate the distance travelled. Please see my post here for more details.