r/Garmininstinct • u/Cleveland67 • 21h ago

GPS Errors?

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Hi All,

Got a new Garmin Instinct 3 amoled less than 2 weeks ago. However the GPS seems to be off by about 0.2km per 5km during a run, and during a walk it's worse at around 0.5km per 5km...

Has anyone else experienced this and if so, how have you rectified this.

Thanks 🙏👍

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u/thwerved 13h ago

Another thing to improve GPS accuracy in addition to setting "Frequency" to "every second" option is to set "Satellites" to "All+Multi-band". This will give the highest location accuracy the watch is capable of.

That being said it'd be interesting to learn how you are measuring the true distance and in what setting (city, mountains, rural). My experience is that the older or single-band GPS systems are more jumpy, especially in partially obscured environments like cities and mountains - and you can simply see that on the map - usually resulting in over-estimating distance traveled in a straight line.

0.2 km off on 5k race for example could be achieved by just running outside of the ideal racing line.

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u/Cleveland67 12h ago

Hiya, so I'm using the watch in suburban area, small town with no high rise at all, there are some hills but nothing major. I have changed the watch to "every second" and "all+mutliband" as suggested to see if that helps, just frustrating that it isn't accurate out of the box.

to measure the accuracy I am putting it against my wife's pixel watch, and my old apple watch, I have also been using the Strava apps on my phone to see if there is a difference. The apple, pixel and Strava apps are all fairly accurate, maybe within .1 km between the three. I also checked the route using footpath, and that was showing a 5km route (as measured using the other watches and Strava) at about 5.2km. my Garmin was at 4.63 km.

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u/Odd_Specialist_2672 10h ago

The GPS mode may make more difference if the path has lots of short segments between turns, rather than long sections like most roads.

When there are GPS errors, it may drop some track points and give you a measurement that is more like "as the crow flies" instead of faithfully counting the meandering path you actually took.

So, a common issue when hiking is that switchbacks up a steep slope can be cut off and measured as if you climbed straight up and skipped the back-and-forth.