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GPS

GPS


Postby david bolster » Tue Apr 23, 2019 10:14 am

How do you decide what is the true length of a walk? A GPS system will give you the length that you actually walked,whereas a map will give you a shorter distance and elevation. For years, people only used maps, - a flat surface, to compute distance and elevation. If a walk description said 10 miles, you knew what they meant. But now, the discrepancy can be as much as 20%. This is obvious, I know. And yet among fellow walkers, it can be divisive on the issue. I cannot find anything on the internet which discusses the issue.
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Re: GPS

Postby scoob999 » Tue Apr 23, 2019 9:11 pm

Me and my wife both have garmins, the 64s and the 66s the distance is pretty much always the same although the height varies sometimes.
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Re: GPS

Postby mrssanta » Wed Apr 24, 2019 8:02 pm

I'd go with which ever one is longer as it makes me feel more gnarly. :lol:
which is why I like km more than miles
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Re: GPS

Postby jolly47roger » Thu Apr 25, 2019 2:31 pm

One problem is that GPS records points and adds up the distances from point to adjacent point. In a perfect world this would be fine but GPS positioning has errors and if it is recording a point every few seconds when you are walking at, say 1 metre per second the errors can introduce a sort of zizgzag effect. How big the error is depends on the strength of the signal - I remember sitting having lunch at the bottom of a valley and finding I had 'travelled' half a mile just by the accumulation of errors.
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Re: GPS

Postby Marty_JG » Sat Jun 01, 2019 3:41 pm

Jolly that's true but a while back we found the Garmin Basecamp has "smoothing" which helped minimise (you have to make a 5 meter change of altitude before it registers it).
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