Suunto 9 Baro football run distance in km

[Alexbg]

That football tracking distance bug just doesn’t give a break. So I go deeper. Suunto App/Sports Tracker gives you a possibility to extract raw data from your watch in FIT (the former app) and in GPX format (the latter app). I found very useful the GPX data. It is very easy to analyze it. Simply open the GPX file with notepad and you see the following pattern for each GPS point:
</trkpt>
<trkpt lat=“42.68561” lon=“23.33532”>
<ele>568.0</ele>
<time>2019-11-24T15:24:27Z</time>
<extensions>
gpxtpx:TrackPointExtension
gpxtpx:hr94</gpxtpx:hr>
</gpxtpx:TrackPointExtension>
</extensions>
</trkpt>
where: lat is Latitude; lon is Longitude; ele is Elevation; time is the time stamp of the GPS refresh point; hr is hart rate;
As far as I read over the net FIT format gives you the possibility to record even more data.
As the GPX file is XML it can be opened in Excel and read in much more user friendly way.

In order to calculate the distance the watch and the apps get the latitude, longitude, (if they want to precise the elevation too) between two time stamps and using a formula calculate the distance.

What I observe in the GPX file is that I have a GPS time stamp every second, BUT the GPS coordinates (latitude and longitude) are the same for a set of data and changes randomly.
Puzzled with this I tried to measure the distance between each change of GPS. I do it on the web with free access Coordinate Distance Calculator. The first ten changes which I checked appeared after distance between to GPS points is exactly 10 meters.

This means that to get an update of your GPS coordinates you need to move at least 10m, i.e. if you move 8m forwards and 8m backwards you will get 0 distance covered.

Lets go back to football. If you play in a field with a size 44m long, 22m wide and you play as midfielder, than you can do countless amount of steps (measured by the accelerator) and negligible run distance.
Now lets go to tennis (one of the 80 sport available on the Suunto 9 Baro). The tennis field split by half (for 1 player) is 12m long and 8m wide. Probably it is better to delete tennis as an option on the watch?!? And there are many other sports: Volleyball, Squash, Ice hockey, Handball and etc., and etc.

Probably this explains the cut corners in sports like running and cycling.

I think this needs a FIX!!! Probably much shorter distance for GPS coordinates refresh or at least a software option to do it if you want.

I’m attaching my GPX file, but you can always check yours. Let me know your thoughts. Thanks.
11_21_19 17_52.gpx

[Dimitrios Kanellopoulos]

@Alexbg hi this is not correct approach to debug an issue. Gpx data are extrapolated / interpolated and are from another service.

Also your watch uses fused distance and speed it doesn’t obey only to GPS. GPS is there to help only.

Here is an activity with the latest fw showing back and forth 10m increments.

https://app.suunto.com/move/dimitrioskanellopoulos/5da20b6b58e211b29b61bc01

And another one.

https://app.suunto.com/move/dimitrioskanellopoulos/5da1da0da6957b4b299b914a

What I suspecting is that you use a sport mode without fused distance and that might be a bug if you used football.

[A Former User]

I agree with the 10 meter assessment. That is the same that I observed when looking at FIT files from my Suunto 9 (from running and trail running activities). It appears distance and coordinate updates usually come with at least 10 meter intervals, sometimes greater than that, but rarely less than 10 meters.

[Alexbg]

@silentvoyager Thanks for sharing your experience on the topic. Only this way Suunto may take steps to fix the bug.

@Dimitrios-Kanellopoulos I greatly appreciate your feedback.
On fused distance - do you mean Fused Track? If not please can you share with me how can I activate fused distance on my Suunto 9 Baro.
If you refer to Fused Track as far as I read it is activated automatically when you switch to Ultra or Endurance battery mode. As I mentioned above I always use Performance mode, because I want best tracking data.

On using GPX file to analyze the problem I go even further. I want to analyze every single distance between two GPS refresh points for a particular exercise. I download FIT file from Suunto App and use https://www.gpsvisualizer.com/ to convert it to plain TXT file. Open the file in Excel. It has the following structure:

I calculate the distance in meters between two GPS points using the following formula:
=ACOS(COS(RADIANS(90-C2)) *COS(RADIANS(90-C3)) +SIN(RADIANS(90-C2)) *SIN(RADIANS(90-C3)) *COS(RADIANS(D2-D3))) *6371000
Everyone who is interested can find more info on the formula on the internet.

And finally I run a histogram statistics on the data.

So it appears that in this particular run 55% of the GPS refresh points are more than 8m away one from the next.
I run the same analysis on several other tracks (walking, cycling and football) showing the same statistics.
So if most of the GPS point coordinates are refreshed when distance is larger than 8-10 meters, that will make the watch unusable for large part of the 80 sports activities pre-set on it.

Please check your own tracks and share your experience.

Performance has a difference meanings. For one person it means more than 100 hours battery endurance, BUT for others it means precision/perfection in tracking. Suunto should give all customers setting on the watch to choose what they want based on their needs.

[freeheeler]

@Alexbg
performance to me is accuracy, endurance is +100h battery…
but Dimitrios was asking if you used the correct sportmode… did you?

[Dimitrios Kanellopoulos]

@Alexbg let me help you. Try a fit file converter . The GPX file you have is not a supported one by our service.

https://fit2tcx.runalyze.com/temp/

Download the fit file via SA and upload it there to get better undersrtanding or correct data.

Alternatively you can give me the FIT file and I can do analysis.

The calculation of the GPS points are doing it via the Vincenty algo or the usual inaccurate one just plain Geodesy ?

Also I am interested on the sport mode you used.

[Alexbg]

@Dimitrios-Kanellopoulos Thanks for the support.
Please find enclosed the FIT file downloaded directly from Suunto App:
Soccer_2019-11-21T17_52_32.fit
On this run I was using Soccer/Football (basic) sport mode with Battery mode on Performance setting for max quality of logs.

[Dimitrios Kanellopoulos]

I can see what you mean. The coords are not recorded very often nor the distance increases.

could you record another time with a sport mode of running just for the sake of it ?

[Alexbg]

@Dimitrios-Kanellopoulos Please find enclosed my latest FIT file:
Running_2019-11-28T17_51_15.fit
Watch: Suunto 9 Baro
Firmware: 2.9.42
Battery mode: Performance Max quality logs
Sport mode: Running
GPS System: GPS + Galileo
AGPS: Watch synchronized with Suunto App before start. Latest AGPS updated on watch
Before start: I wait for GPS signal to turn green and wait 1 additional minute before start

What I see from analyzing the FIT in excel is better coordination update, but still not good enough. Please see the stats below:

More coordination update points than previous time, but still 40% of updated coordinates are above 8 meters between previous and next GPS point.

Do you think this can be fixed?
Thanks for your support.

[Dimitrios Kanellopoulos]

@Alexbg It can be fixed and you could even try with the prev GPS firmware. I need to report this.

[Alexbg]

@Dimitrios-Kanellopoulos Thanks a lot for the support.

I don’t want to go to previous GPS firmware as I will lose the VO2Max, Sleep quality assessment, Stress level and body resources graph. I rather wait till the next firmware update. I saw on the forum that other customers are unhappy with the GPS coordinates frequency update rate. I hope Suunto will solve it soon.

Thanks.