Tag: garmin

Ambit vs. 910xt GPS comparison

A couple of screenshots from google-earth. These are GPX files exported from my own Garmin 910xt and my friend's Suunto Ambit.


The 910xt was set on "smart recording", while the Ambit was set to record every second. Both watches are quite confused in tunnels or under bridges. It's clear that the garmin-trace is somehow filtered. A better comparison would perhaps be to set the 910xt also on 1s-interval recording.

Nokia N9 vs. Garmin Edge 800 GPS Test

My legs aren't exactly recovered from Saturday's marathon, but a slow 5k jog anyway today. Sports Tracker was released for the N9 last week (or was it earlier?), so I thought I'd do some GPS testing. Held Garmin Edge 800 in my right hand and the N9 in my left. The results aren't that great for the N9:

I should do a test on the bike later. Maybe include the Garmin 405cx and older C7 phone also?

The touch-screens on these devices are different: Edge 800 works fine with gloves, N9 doesn't work at all with gloves.

Nokia N900 vs Garmin Edge800 GPS comparison

On Wednesday I had a Garmin Edge 800 (red line in the pics) on my bike while Risto was using a Nokia N900 (blue line). Here are a few comparisons of the GPS-traces. Our bikes were obviously not exactly following the same route, so that accounts for some of the differences. The Edge800 seems to take GPS-samples a more often than the N900.

See also N95 vs 405cx testing here and here.

Saturday 20k bike ride

Biking in the early spring is a messy business. Most of the roads are now free from ice and snow, but the bike-paths are all covered in remains of sand and gravel from the winter with the occasional patch of ice, snow, or a wet slurry. Even with reasonable fenders on the bike your back and legs are pretty much covered in mud after an hour.

Data is from my latest gps-toy, which supports openstreetmap! (20.1k in 58mins, avg-speed 20.8km/h, avg-HR 148, temp +0 C)

Come spring/summer the plan is to put in some longer training rides to complement the running training. Maybe even some brevets on the new road-bike.

The temperature measurement circuit or transducer on the edge 800 seems to have a long-ish time-constant of about 15 minutes:


N95 vs. 405cx GPS test

GPS-running is so fun I decided it's time for a new toy: A Garmin 405 cx ! Out on a walk we go, comparing the N95 running sports-tracker with the 405cx.

whole_walk

Here's a test where I wore the 405cx (red trace) on my wrist and the N95 (yellow trace) with sports-tracker running in my pocket. I didn't turn them both on exactly at the same time, but there does seem to be a difference in the distance and kCal values. In addition to the time/distance data the 405cx also uses heart-rate data for computing calories.

N95: 6.58 km, 1h 4 min, 576 kCal
405cx: 6.32 km, 1h 7min, 324 kCal

The N95 GPS data is much more wiggly, as seen in this picture of a long straight bit of the walk:

straight_line

That probably also explains the extra distance on the N95, since the wiggles never go away:

n95_jumpy

Although the GPS-Filtering was set to "High" on the N95, it shows strange jumps along the shore-line where the satellite visibility to the South should be OK.

n95_low_and_right

Here it looks like the N95 position (yellow) fix is first a lot to the east, and then significantly south of the bridge I actually crossed. Then for some reason the 405cx (red) and the N95 agree again. I think the 405cx samples position at 4 s intervals, so some cutting of corners is understandable.

This test wasn't entirely fair since the 405cx was on my wrist while the N95 was in my pocket. I need to re-do this test with the N95 and its antenna held at a similar height/visibility compared to the 405cx.

Garmin is doing a lot of things right with the 405cx: No extra GPS-pod like with the Polar products, a set of nice youtube-videos practically replace the manual, charging through the USB-port(why doesn't the N95 have this?), to name a few.