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why does surge not use GPS data?

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‎01-02-2016 02:44

‎01-02-2016 02:44

Hi there. I would like to know why Surge collects GPS data, but does not use it? Instead dashboard uses inferior methods such as stride length and altimeter.

I have seen many complaints regarding accurate recording of elevation and distance in the dashboard... and it seems you can bypass these problems by exporting the GPS data to an external app such as runkeeper. 

Why not just use the GPS data??!!

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2 REPLIES 2

‎01-02-2016 03:53

‎01-02-2016 03:53

It does use GPS when appropriate but not all the time. As the battery only lasts 5 hours with GPS on this is a necessary compromise.

 

It is used when you track one of the activities that make use of GPS. For more information see page 11 onwards in the manual:

 

https://staticcs.fitbit.com/content/assets/help/manuals/manual_surge_en_US.pdf

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‎01-02-2016 12:57

In response to SteveH

‎01-02-2016 12:57

Thankyou for the swift reply - I have read the manual but this does not quite answer my question. I will make the problem concrete with an example to help explain.

I went for a run yesterday with my fitbit surge and used GPS - seemingly without a problem. However, the data shown on my fitbit dashboard looked funny, especially for elevation. It was an out and back run, so elevation for the second half should be a mirror of the first. The km splits also looked funny. 

So I loaded the .tcx file into runkeeper, and the data looked quite different (and as it should). 

So the question remains: why is fitbit dashboard not using the GPS data correctly to display information about my run? The data is obviously there and ok, because it looks fine when uploaded to a 3rd party app.

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