Foot pods with Garmin watch: please help

yirara

I'm so terribly annoyed that my super expensive Garmin watch is cutting corners when recording runs (don't care about hiking or cycling). This is annoying because I'm trying to finish a 10k running plan with a time goal. On my phone, which records wonderful tracks I might manage. On my watch, which is about 0:14min/km slower I won't.

Thus foot pods. can anyone explain to me how they work and measure data? Do they still work if literally every step has a different length and my pace varies wildly as well? Which model ties in with my Garmin Fenix 6s pro (won it) and still allows me to see maps on Garmin connect? I'm sure the Stryd can do it, but it's way above my paygrade.

NorthCascades

They're supposed to be very accurate. I think they measure acceleration to determine how much time your foot is off the ground, and have a good sense of distance. It's my understanding that they won't affect the map you record, so your corners will look the same, but your watch will take distance from the foot pod instead of from GPS.

Have you looked at the maps your watch produces in Google Earth, Golden Cheetah, or whatever? Connect doesn't display every point in the file and cuts corners. Or at least it did, they may have fixed that. But if not it might not be the watch.

yirara

NorthCascades wrote: »

They're supposed to be very accurate. I think they measure acceleration to determine how much time your foot is off the ground, and have a good sense of distance. It's my understanding that they won't affect the map you record, so your corners will look the same, but your watch will take distance from the foot pod instead of from GPS.

Have you looked at the maps your watch produces in Google Earth, Golden Cheetah, or whatever? Connect doesn't display every point in the file and cuts corners. Or at least it did, they may have fixed that. But if not it might not be the watch.

Thanks a lot. Thus there's a chance that a foot pod might give me more accurate data without losing additional stuff like maps. That's good.

Yes, I've looked at my tracks, both produced by my running app and by my watch. The watch is quite poor. I know that the gps signal in my home town is really bad for some odd reason. My Garmin handheld also has problems here. My phone has problems, but nowhere near as bad as those two devices. Which is odd as there are literally no big buildings in most places, and streets tend to be fairly wide (for western Europe). There's a huge amount of broadcasting cooperation here, but I can't imagine that their signals leak into the GPS band. *shrugs*

Thus might be a good idea to look into this in a bit more detail. Do you have a recommendation for a food pod? Battery would be great compared to rechargeable, and I can still get discontinued devices with a bit of searching. I'm also using an external HR sensor that bluetooths into the watch. Thus not certain how many other devices I can connect (never had to).

jjpptt2

Can you change the frequency with which your watch takes readings? It may shorten the battery life but increase tracking accuracy.

Just a thought.

dolorsit

14s/km difference between your Garmin and phone seems huge. Are you running through dense city streets or something? As the above poster says, you can set your Garmin to record at 1s intervals rather than variable intervals, but still I wouldn't expect there to be that great a difference there. A foot pod might be helpful if you're running round lots of corners on city streets with large buildings that block out satellite coverage.

I have a Stryd foot pod which is usually no more than a meter out when I run round a 400m track, but as you say, it's expensive. The alternatives are the Garmin footpod or HRM Pro/Tri straps. They both measure running dynamics/steps and should be more accurate in those situations. They do assume some regularity in your stride length though. Some description here: https://fellrnr.com/wiki/Footpod and dcrainmaker.com is a good place to check for reviews.

NorthCascades

Following up on @jjpptt2's suggestion. In the system menu somewhere you can decide between "smart recording" and "every second." Make sure it's set to every second, the default is smart and you have to change it.

Smart recording comes from the days of not having much storage. Like when there was 32 megs in a unit. So it only records a point when it thinks it needs to, to show a change in direction or speed. Obviously according to some threshold. That feature is ancient, it might still be aggressive about storage space, and cutting your corners.

In case I wasn't clear earlier, I think you should also try taking the raw data from the watch and viewing it in another app. Because it might be Garmin Connect not showing all of the data the watch is recording.

NorthCascades

Also, I can't recommend a foot pod. Sorry, never used one. I looked into them a few years ago because earlier Fenix versions weren't great at distance in the woods hiking. We have so much dense forest. I would read about the trail I was going to hike, it might say I should reach a trail junction at 7 km and I need to go left. Then the watch would say I hiked 10 km and I still haven't reached the junction and now I'm starting to worry that I might have got lost, but it was that the watch wasn't measuring distance well. 😡 So I read all about foot pods and how they work before I learned the watch won't use one in hiking mode. 🙄 The F6 is much better than the F3 was about this and now with maps it's not an issue at all. So everything I've read about any pods is out of date and poorly remembered. But there's a site, fellner.net I think, that reviews them the way DC Rainmaker does watches.

dolorsit

The thing is, smart recording records more often when you are rapidly changing direction, so you'd see more data points going round a corner, and fewer going in a straight line. Hence it shouldn't account for the 14s/km speed difference. Still, with the amount of memory watches have these days, I always set it that way.

yirara

For those asking: Yes, I set the watch to 1s recording, chose the best satellite combination (Glonass has more satellites, but Galileo still gives better results), and I've downloaded the raw tracks to look at them in google earth. Also started wearing the watch on the inside of my wrist. And of course the satellite file is updated. This is the best I can get. And it's poor. The recording quality is better in other towns with higher buildings and narrower streets. It's really as if something's messing with the signal here. Here most buildings have two floors and maybe an attic. Very few flat buildings, very few narrow streets. I've started running through the 'bad' neighbourhoods as roads are even wider and there are very little trees. The difference is still substantial, if a bit better.

dolorsit

Some observations/advice here on choosing satellite combinations:
https://the5krunner.com/2019/05/23/garmin-forerunner-945-gps-accuracy/
I think I use GPS+Glonass, but have a footpod so not sure if that makes much difference for me.

yirara

Yes, I tested all different satellite combination as I wrote above. I found the one that works best for me. And it still gives a substantial pace difference.

heybales

Mine is the older Garmin footpod - it's a stride-length setting that merely measures impacts.
There was a smaller newer model that did the same. Since even that one I thought I did see one that used accelerometer, perhaps different company though. And the HR-straps that contain running dynamics doing the same thing.

My footpod would be great and fine if my stride length was always pretty steady. But my Run/walk intervals kills it.

I haven't done a compare in awhile. there's a Windows program that'll take the raw data, your setting, and GPS or known distance, and give you a better stride setting to use.
Which also means I can leave the setting to use GPS data for reporting, but gather the footpod data, and that program can access it.
In the past the run/walk nature just killed any ability for accuracy.

Might read through some dcrainmaker reviews.