[Sandwich]

Anybody here track their DH rides via gps? I'm thinking about throwing either my old phone or my garmin in a fanny pack or something so I can see how far and fast I go. If so, what do you use? Will a phone last all day with gps on but screen off?

 

[Jm_]

Anybody here track their rides via gps? I'm thinking about throwing either my old phone or my garmin in a fanny pack or something so I can see how far and fast I go. If so, what do you use? Will a phone last all day with gps on but screen off?

I use a Garmin Instinct, has worked fine for 100 mile races in both winter and summer and I've used it longer than 11 hours with no problems. It did shut off somewhere after 16 hours of working constantly during the first stage of the Iditarod, but it charges real fast too. I've run a phone for a few hours, but IME they start draining pretty fast after a few hours and especially if you use it for nav. In-reach and some others like etrex will also do it, but probably have to be uploaded manually to Strava to look at stats.

 

[HAB]

Nope.

 

[Westy]

 

[johnbryanpeters]

Garmin GPSMAP 64s

 

[Gary]

Tomtom multisport on mtb - unobtrusive and minmalist bar mounted GPS tracker with 3 metrics on screen at any time, scrollable through plenty others. No maps. battery will last about 8 hrs (or 4 backlit at night)

Old Garmin 800 on roadbike has maps, cadence, HR lasts 8+hrs screen. Newer ones eg. 830 last even better. but kinda bulky for mtb

Had a Garmin 530 for a while on the Ebike. Hated it so sold it on after a few months.

all data can be shared/uploaded to Strava/phone and other apps if that's your thing

Throwing any GPS in a bumbag is dumb. and not just because it means you're wearing a bumbag in public . GPS signal/accuracy is notably reduced.

 

[Toshi]

Apple Watch -> Strava. Can get my heart rate from glancing at watch on a non-technical section, too. Clean and easy solution.

 

[johnbryanpeters]

...
Throwing any GPS in a bumbag is dumb. and not just because it means you're wearing a bumbag in public . GPS signal/accuracy is notably reduced.

Care to elucidate?

 

[6thElement]

garmin nerds

i know there's a few of us here. i was poking around the connect app and finally after all these years clicked on the "challenges" tab and signed up for a few. been using it for years, but kinda had just been doing my own thing, i thought maybe this could help me kick things up a little more. i...

ridemonkey.bikemag.com

 

[StiHacka]

GPS watch not good enough?

 

[Gary]

Care to elucidate?

really?

Are you a flat earther or something?

 

[johnbryanpeters]

really?

Are you a flat earther or something?

No, I'm not. I'd like to know the basis of your statement that carrying a GPS in a [fanny] pack reduces its accuracy. I have read nothing that would support your assertion.

 

[sethimus]

why should a piece of fabric shield off frequencies in the 1xxx mhz range? are fanny packs in scotland covered in metal?

on topic: wahoo roam with speed and cadence sensor + pulse meter. looking to upgrade to a decent powermeter

 

[johnbryanpeters]

why should a piece of fabric shield off frequencies in the 1xxx mhz range? are fanny packs in scotland covered in metal?

on topic: wahoo roam with speed and cadence sensor + pulse meter. looking to upgrade to a decent powermeter

I found one article that claimed with no supporting citations that one's body can to some extent block reception of satellite radio signals.

 

[Gary]

No, I'm not. I'd like to know the basis of your statement that carrying a GPS in a [fanny] pack reduces its accuracy. I have read nothing that would support your assertion.

Experience

 

[Gary]

wet tree cover reduces it's accuracy even more

yeah. mountainbiking in Scotland

 

[englertracing]

If your anti bike app
Try backcountry nav.
You can download maps so they will be avaliable offline. All types avaliable imagery topo etc...

Will for sure run all day.

 

[slimshady]

I have to admit from my own experience with Garmin GPS units and also phones both the tree cover and clothing seriously impact the signal reception. The main reason being most of the satellites in range are not directly above you, but close to the horizon. Add the weakness of the signal after traveling 36000 km and the amount of area covered by each individual satellite and you'll see how easy is to have your GPS unit reading an inaccurate position.

Watches tend to be both facing upwards when you ride (their GPS/Glonass antennas are flat and lie parallel to the terrain that way, maximizing their reception), and avoid being covered by clothing/gloves since one needs to see them.

 

[Jm_]

wet tree cover reduces it's accuracy even more

yeah. mountainbiking in Scotland

Wait, there's trees?

 

[canadmos]

Are the dates on thus thread wrong or something? I thought you had a thread about this already...

I just use my phone. If you turn on airplane mode and don't use the screen much, it'll for sure last all day.

And for biking, a phone and whatever inaccuracies it has based on being in your bag or under a tree will be good enough. I've always found my phone to be pretty accurate, within a few meters usually, unless you're in super deep steep gullies or super dense foliage....but haven't had my tracks wander like they used too 5 years ago.

 

[Jm_]

I have to admit from my own experience with Garmin GPS units and also phones both the tree cover and clothing seriously impact the signal reception. The main reason being most of the satellites in range are not directly above you, but close to the horizon. Add the weakness of the signal after traveling 36000 km and the amount of area covered by each individual satellite and you'll see how easy is to have your GPS unit reading an inaccurate position.

Watches tend to be both facing upwards when you ride (their GPS/Glonass antennas are flat and lie parallel to the terrain that way, maximizing their reception), and avoid being covered by clothing/gloves since one needs to see them.

Kind of, but things change. Modern GPS uses use WAAS, which is a stationary sat that acts like another, gives more accurate elevation data and helps with the system's error-checking, they also use GLONAS and the European GPS system, so they tend to be pretty accurate. Not perfect, but pretty good. Military goes out and does intentional GPS jamming all the time, so that's something to keep in mind. I haven't seen it on my watch or personal devices, but I've seen it while flying in an airplane and it just gave up on an instrument approach.

Common misconception is that GPS sats send out position. They are screaming across the sky at tens of thousands of MPH, so obviously they aren't that keen as to where they really are. What they send out is atomic time. The receiver does differential eq math to solve for one time that accounts for all of the various different received times. This is why it takes 4 sats for a 3d position, whereas you'd think it all you need is 3. It needs 5 for 3d position and error-checking. They call it "pseudo-ranging" because the GPS signal isn't telling them how far away the sat is, at least not directly, it's a process that works backwards that if sat a time signal was received at y time, it must have traveled z distance at the speed of light.

Phones often do not use GPS for position, even when they have it, they often use cell tower triangulation. Some are better than others though and do rely more on GPS.

You might find that more modern GPS units are far better at receiving the signals, incorporating WAAS and the other GPS constellations.

 

[Bikael Molton]

An iPhone will last all day. I use Strava.

I have a Garmin InReach for backcountry rides, but I only use it for the "Helicopter, come get me please" button.

Take a look at GaiaGPS or CalTopo if you need pro-level map and routing features rather than heart rate or other sports features.

 

[mykel]

really?

Are you a flat earther or something?

 

[Sandwich]

serves me right for asking a DH specific question in the DH forum. This got out of hand.

I'm looking for something to track shuttle runs specifically, not trail rides. I'll be taking the chairlift to the top and riding down. Don't care much about segments or anything like that, just want to see how fast I go and how many miles in total.

I have a Galaxy Watch, iPhone, and Garmin 530 that I can use to track. I hate wearing the Gwatch- it's a great idea, but in practice it's a 56g steel brick on my wrist and it jiggles on trail rides, so I think it'll be miserable on a DH day. The garmin is perfect but I'd be apprehensive about strapping my brand new GPS to a DH bike in case of wrecking. The iphone is nearly valueless as a trade in, and by the time the kids need a phone they won't want it either, which is why it's my top choice. I just don't know how to carry it, nor how it would last for ~8hr of riding. I suppose I can pause it up the lift to make it last longer, but I'd love a set and forget option.

For trail riding, I've been strapping the garmin to my bars for trail rides and for road rides, and it's awesome.

 

[Westy]

Garmin GPSMAP 64s

Unnecessary fancy distractions!

 

[jonKranked]

Edge 530 because it logs air time

 

[canadmos]

serves me right for asking a DH specific question in the DH forum. This got out of hand.

I'm looking for something to track shuttle runs specifically, not trail rides. I'll be taking the chairlift to the top and riding down. Don't care much about segments or anything like that, just want to see how fast I go and how many miles in total.

I have a Galaxy Watch, iPhone, and Garmin 530 that I can use to track. I hate wearing the Gwatch- it's a great idea, but in practice it's a 56g steel brick on my wrist and it jiggles on trail rides, so I think it'll be miserable on a DH day. The garmin is perfect but I'd be apprehensive about strapping my brand new GPS to a DH bike in case of wrecking. The iphone is nearly valueless as a trade in, and by the time the kids need a phone they won't want it either, which is why it's my top choice. I just don't know how to carry it, nor how it would last for ~8hr of riding. I suppose I can pause it up the lift to make it last longer, but I'd love a set and forget option.

For trail riding, I've been strapping the garmin to my bars for trail rides and for road rides, and it's awesome.

You're thinking too hard about this.

Phone + pocket + strava/trailforks (in private mode should you desire)

 

[Sandwich]

Got no pockets in my dh gear, but that works

 

[Cerberus75]

They make phone cases with an external battery.

serves me right for asking a DH specific question in the DH forum. This got out of hand.

I'm looking for something to track shuttle runs specifically, not trail rides. I'll be taking the chairlift to the top and riding down. Don't care much about segments or anything like that, just want to see how fast I go and how many miles in total.

I have a Galaxy Watch, iPhone, and Garmin 530 that I can use to track. I hate wearing the Gwatch- it's a great idea, but in practice it's a 56g steel brick on my wrist and it jiggles on trail rides, so I think it'll be miserable on a DH day. The garmin is perfect but I'd be apprehensive about strapping my brand new GPS to a DH bike in case of wrecking. The iphone is nearly valueless as a trade in, and by the time the kids need a phone they won't want it either, which is why it's my top choice. I just don't know how to carry it, nor how it would last for ~8hr of riding. I suppose I can pause it up the lift to make it last longer, but I'd love a set and forget option.

For trail riding, I've been strapping the garmin to my bars for trail rides and for road rides, and it's awesome.

There are phone cases with an external battery for back up. They're pretty cheap for older models.

 

[Gary]

Edge 530 because it logs air time

Don't forget the really annoying handy live notifications after every jump.

I bought the 530 thinking the live trailforks info might be cool for highlighting good trails when riding new destinations. it's not. it's utterly gash and to get any decent info on any trail it highlights you still need to use the app on a phone or research/memorise trail names before the ride.
Garmins are still about 10 years behind a basic android phone in function.

 

[mtg]

serves me right for asking a DH specific question in the DH forum. This got out of hand.

I'm looking for something to track shuttle runs specifically, not trail rides. I'll be taking the chairlift to the top and riding down. Don't care much about segments or anything like that, just want to see how fast I go and how many miles in total.

I have a Galaxy Watch, iPhone, and Garmin 530 that I can use to track. I hate wearing the Gwatch- it's a great idea, but in practice it's a 56g steel brick on my wrist and it jiggles on trail rides, so I think it'll be miserable on a DH day. The garmin is perfect but I'd be apprehensive about strapping my brand new GPS to a DH bike in case of wrecking. The iphone is nearly valueless as a trade in, and by the time the kids need a phone they won't want it either, which is why it's my top choice. I just don't know how to carry it, nor how it would last for ~8hr of riding. I suppose I can pause it up the lift to make it last longer, but I'd love a set and forget option.

For trail riding, I've been strapping the garmin to my bars for trail rides and for road rides, and it's awesome.

Use the iPhone. You have it, and they actually work really well for this, better than my old Garmin Fenix 2 watch, and similar to my current Fenix 5X.

 

[toodles]

Yeah I just run a Fenix. The family got me one for my birthday and its pretty awesome. For shuttles its quick to get a GPS fix and easy to use (i lock the keys though because my glove band sometimes hits the pause button). For trail rides the map function is really decent and a lot of trails are already preloaded. You can even make up a course map on their Webpage and send it to the watch for navigation if you're going someplace new or unfamiliar.

 

[Jm_]

Some of the most important things for me on my Instinct watch are riding time, mileage, temperature (bike has a sensor and it blue-tooths), sometimes HR, I can see text msgs on it, if my phone rings, it tells me who is calling so I can decide whether I want to stop and dig it out, etc. Also kind of nice that it shows some of these things in the last 4-hrs, like what was the min temp, the max, the min HR, the max, etc.

With the mileage, this is super helpful to correspond to location. If you are constantly tracking with trailforks, you either have the phone on a mount all the time, which means you are pobably going to draw the battery down rather fast from checking it, or you have to keep digging it out to see where you are. With the constant mileage on the watch, I don't need to dig the phone out nearly as much, because I know at 4.6 miles there is a trail split and I I know when I'm there with the watch. You *can* load a course onto it, but it's pretty involved and it will alert you if you get "off course", but I didn't find that use to be very practical. The miles and ride time though, hell yeah. Also easy to keep track of when to eat some food, etc.

And then of course it captures all the metrics for strava or connect, so you can see exactly where you were and anything else you want. The fact that there is no touch screen and it's on my body for warmth is a huge bonus too.

I can't say the iphone mapping/GPS is any better, if anything, it's worse looking at the tracks. Not horrible, but probably subject to all the same issues. The other thing is I don't want to mess with the phone, in case of injury and needing more battery life. Take this with a grain of salt, but I sort-of trust this individual: A friend said he called 911 in the Colorado mountains with no coverage to see what happened and he said he did get connected with a dispatcher, who then verbally lashed him for "checking".

 

[sethimus]

I found one article that claimed with no supporting citations that one's body can to some extent block reception of satellite radio signals.

there are fanny packs made out of real fannies?

 

[sethimus]

serves me right for asking a DH specific question in the DH forum. This got out of hand.

I'm looking for something to track shuttle runs specifically, not trail rides. I'll be taking the chairlift to the top and riding down. Don't care much about segments or anything like that, just want to see how fast I go and how many miles in total.

there is a skiing app for that, slopes. sadly the developer is not interested in expanding it for bikeparks, at all.

Connect Strava to Slopes — Easy One-Tap Integration

Track your day on the mountain with Slopes, then show it off on Strava. Activate the integration and Slopes will automatically send your data, for your friends to cheer on.

getslopes.com

never tried it with biking, probably flags it as a winter activity in strava, should record how many runs you did though

 

[Kanye West]

All of us meatsacks are giant vessels of water, which basically acts as a VERY anisotropic signal amplifier when placed up against an antenna. Most antennas have weird gains in weird directions to begin with, and your sweaty carcass isn't helping with that.

Yes, keeping the phone on your body will get different results. So will a million other things.


Some of you just need to ride your fucking bike and put the gadgets away. Especially the internet.

 

[Gary]

But without a fucking gadget and the fucking Internet we wouldn't be able to tell you on the fucking Internet exactly how much MOAR we ride our fucking bikes than you

 

[johnbryanpeters]

I use a GPS mostly for trail design/build/maintain. I record with it, export .gpx files, use ExpertGPS to record existing trails and to create planning routes.

Secondary use is to record riding wandering when i travel.

Not interested in the mutual masturbation of internet "competition", e.g. KOM or whatever.

 

[cecil]

I used to use my phone bought a Garmin 830 in may it's like having a dashboard on your bike
I set the screen to the compass I track rides so I know if I'm riding more miles each year than the previous

 

[Andeh]

I use a Garmin 530 and like it for the dashboard. The ability to track miles on various components on Garmin Connect is good for managing suspension service intervals too. The minimap is helpful on unfamiliar but sanctioned trails too. I used that function a ton last weekend in Tahoe to know how close we were to a junction without digging out my phone. Phone drain while using it is super minimal, even with Livetrack running.

I have a K-Edge top cap mount which includes a breakway mount disc (cost $3 to replace). Coupled with the lanyard, I'm not really worried about trashing the Garmin. I can confirm the breakway disc works as intended.