I tracked my MTB ride today simultaneously with two Garmin Devices.
Activity 1 was tracked with my Garmin Edge and Activity 2 was tracked with my Garmin Fenix.
(I just need the GPX File from Activity 2 to add it to my OSM GPS Traces later, and will delete it from all platforms after that).
I have those two activities on GC and on Strava.
GC
The original activities are classified as follows:
A MTB Activity with my Garmin Edge Garmin Connect (18.60 km)
A Track Me Activity with my Garmin Fenix Garmin Connect (19.91 km)
Strava
The imported activities on Strava are correct.
If Intervals gets an activity from both Garmin Connect and Strava, it will only keep the FIT file and data streams from Garmin. Thatās because the Garmin FIT contains more data then the one from Strava. Strava sends a modified activity file where some streams are stripped (L/R balance is an example). A name change on Garmin Connect canāt be captured because Intervals only gets the original FIT file from Garmin. Changes on Garmin Connect website canāt be seen by Intervals.
If you edit a number of things (name, RPE, ā¦) on Strava, those can be captured by Intervals through webhooks. Thatās the solution david came up with: get the most correct data from Garmin and eventually some post ride edits from Strava.
The way the Strava and Garmin activities are ācoupledā is pretty basic. Same time and comparable distance is all I think.
What you are coming up with here is a really long shotā¦ 2 devices, both synced to both platforms but with a different activity type.
Short answer is simple: All three platforms are WRONG because it is physically impossible to do 2 different activities at the same time. Intervals is doing best here in my opinion because if one activity is on both Garmin and Strava, there is one resulting activity with information from both sites completing each other.
If all you need extra is the GPX from the ride, you can easily get that from the Edge activity on Garmin Connect. Settings wheel, Export as GPX. That seems a lot easier then having to delete the second activity on three platforms afterwards.
I may be missing something here, and Iām sure you will tell me if I do. But I honestly think that you are making things much more complicated then necessary.
I am aware, that the fit file used by intervals.icu is the original GC fit file.
I am aware, that the Name and Description of an activity is synced between Strava and intervals.icu.
The reason I recorded with two devices (Three devices, actually. The 3rd being my smartphone.) is that one GPS Track is just not good enough to create an accurate hiking or MTB path on OpenStreetMap. All the GPS devices are slightly off, and having 3 independent GPX Files for my one MTB Ride allows me to create more accurate paths or improve existing paths on OpenStreetMap.
I just need one of these tracks for my fitness metrics. That is the Activity 1 from my Garmin Edge. Activity 2 and 3 are redundant in the scope of GC, Strava, and intervals.icu and will be removed soon. Ideally, a Track me activity should also not contribute to my load, so also if I forget to delete it, I do not get double the load.
The reason I made this post is that the approach used by intervals.icu is not robust enough. I am aware that this is a very edge case scenario, but still, intervals.icu should not get confused by me using GC and Strava in a way, which they are not intended for.
The two activities do not have the same starting time, distance, moving time, elevation, or device. I think it should be relatively easy to fix that problem and improve the robustness of the import algorithm.
And if intervals.icu can deal with my very edge-case behavior, it should also become much more stable for all the other users
Sorry, but there is a todo list with loads of things that are much more important then this edge case. It could eventually be done, but my opinion is that this has a quite low priority. Most users are enchanted with the way Intervals handles GC/Strava doubles.
I have to say, I am a bit offended by your comment. Would you rather have me stop reporting the issues I am running into in my daily usage of intervals.icu? If you are a developer, and you disagree with my bug reports, then I will gladly stop reporting, of course.
If there is a bug report section in the forum, I think that the developer wants all issues to be reported. I did not spend my free time today writing this bug report (which took me quite a while) to waste your time (as your comment makes it sound), or to waste my own time. It did it, because I think that it is very beneficial for a software project if the users report all possible issues, and that the robustness of all parts of the code is continually improved. As I am working in research and software development, the mentality of my bug reports is also coming from that field.
And I really like intervals.icu and would like to see it continually improved.
That the issue is very low on the to-do list is totally fine for me. It is not a feature breaking bug and I have no direct benefit from the fix either, as I delete the duplicate activities anyway.
I still think that this is a problem in the code worth reporting, and that it should be fixed in the long term.
Off course not. But it might help, certainly for these kind of edge cases, to immediately point to what you want to achieve and what your motivation is. Improving OSM maps is after all beneficial to all users around here.
Iām quite active on the forum and my first goal is always to help out people getting started, sometimes by just explaining how it works, sometimes by explaining workarounds for known problems. But I also have a learning process to go through because there are circumstances where I jump to conclusions to quickly. If I have offended you in any way, I sincerely want to apologize. It just wasnāt clear to me where you were heading.
I am also sorry for jumping to that conclusion, and I am sorry for my emotional/provocative post above.
I just wanted to write a small, concise bug report for the developer, and not go into the bigger detail of why I am doing this actually. I will try to be more specific for my future bug reports, and try to lay out my intentions more clearly.
Thank you for always helping out the newcomers here!
not sure why you need 3 tracks but maybe just install some mtb/hiking specific maps on your device with all the paths?
PS. I would stick to the device with multiband (fenix if it is 7 or edge if it is the newest)
1 track with multiband should be accurate enough. by using 3 tracks, maybe you are averaging something but at the same time itis not enought to make anything much more accurate.
and not go into the bigger detail of why I am doing this actually.
I do not need the GPS Traces from my devices to navigate. I need them to create and improve mtb/hiking specific maps, paths, and routes. There are still lots of paths which do not exist in the maps or only in bad quality.
Take a look at my OSM Profile.
If your compare the GPS Traces for activities in very challenging terrain (the 3 Degenhorn ones for example), they diverge quite a lot. My Garmin Watch is the F7SS with Multi-Band GPS, the Edge ist the Edge 840 with Multi-Band GPS, but it is not enough.
The bad GPS quality is especially noticeable on steep climbing passage on a mountaineering activity or in the forest. Unfortunately, satellite imagery is also not that helpful in both that cases, because the paths are not visible.
So the only way to improve the MTB/Hiking Paths in the OSM (which basically feeds all MTB/Hiking Tour Creators like Komoot, Outdooractive, etc., and should therefore be of the highest possible equality) is by taking the average of a lot of GPS Traces and using different satellite imagery to guess the truest paths.
Nice
I like your contributors approach
My only problem is logical, unless you print those maps and use them in a much more vintage way (with a compass, measuring your position etc), even with a very good trace you are left with a simple problem, the person walking/riding your route will use gps to set its own position which will be not accurate at all
The bad GPS quality is especially noticeable on steep climbing passage
technical limitation of gps, you always want to be in a center of a triangle (made of 3 satellites at least) but being on a steep climb you are limiting the view of the sky and you are pushing yourself to a side of a triangle making your location much more prone to being hugely inaccurate (being far from the center you gradually loose accuracy)
Maybe some kind of a DIY stick mounted on your head with your watch/gps antenna on top could improve readings?
is by taking the average of a lot of GPS Traces and using different satellite imagery to guess the truest paths.
this part I know, just wanted to point out, 3 devices is much closer to one then to āa lotā
3 devices are still connected to same satellites so the error is just in calculation (limitation of gps system) and probably slightly shift in calculation time among debices.
Recording at different times (different satellite setups) could improve accuracy too
Anyway interesting stuff
I cannot really follow your line of thought. My incentive is to create the best digital map possible.
The OSM map is used by various routing services to calculate distance, time, difficulty, etc., maybe a different route will be recommended by Komoot if it has good path data available.
Looking it at the digital map in any app on your phone (or on the printout), it should be a perfect representation of the real world.
What does the wobbly GPS position of the person using this map has to do with the mapping of the path in the OSM?
The GPS Traces uploaded can be used by everyone who is editing the OSM (some apps even auto-upload to that website). In best case more GPS Traces accumulate over time and there the quality of the paths can be also be improved over time.
There are of course various professional devices, providing better data than sports specific devices or smartphones. But instead of buying that, I just use three lower quality devices.
Just wanted to point out that no matter how accurate the trace will be, you or other users will be always limited by inaccuracy of the device they use at the single moment of a hike or ride. So even if your path has 10cm error only (due to thousands of records), gps will still be wonky at those places and will result with 10m accuracy at best. Before gps, we were navigating by a map, now we use gps and map is just a hint.
So to give an example: lets say a perfect map is showing a nice place (with a nice view) 25km into a hike, but Iām using my watch and its distance can be still ~100m off one way or the other, depends on how many small readings were off by 1-5meters. But even with a wrong distance I will be at a correct place (with a shift of gps single inaccuracy only).
Before gps, perfect maps were crucial bc you navigated them from one point to the other calculating next points from previous ones and small error could grow into a huge one really fast bc of lack of points of refference. But with gps you just have a magic reset button where any major error in navigation is reseting itself every second with a small payment of constant couple o meters of inaccuracy. So gps is just a virtual constant point of reference. It was not meant to trace, but to give position.
But ofc I understand the idea of a perfect trace. Probably I have a different personal background where I learned to plan my action (at work) according to a useful result (just to save some time). I understand the idea of a perfect representation of the world in a digital form. Just for me it is strange that noone can use it at the moment so it is a perfect world for its own. But again I like your work and value very highly people who contribute to OSM or other free huge databases like Wiki etc. From my perspective all databases made by many people are prone to small mistakes anyways. So Iām impressed you are kind of acting against āpeoples errorā and using 3 devices to get best readings. Itās just interesting.
