# Improving Strava Accuracy



## RaptorTC (Jul 20, 2012)

Hey everyone, I was just wondering if someone could help me out here. About a month or so ago I got a new phone (LG Lucid) and immediately noticed that the gps tracks on Strava were no where near as accurate as they were with my old phone (Motorola Droid 2). An example is here Bike Ride Profile | I Hate My Phone grp 9-17 near Ann Arbor Charter Township | Times and Records | Strava It appears that my phone lost contact with a satellite and decided to just draw lines all willy nilly until it found another one. This resulted in my actual mileage being over by about 3 miles, which lead to my speed being off, and of course there is the laugh that is my 134mph top speed. 

Oddly enough, sometimes the phone works fine. A few days ago it recorded my mtb race route correctly as well as the distance. I didn't do anything different with my phone, and I'm kind of confused how the open road drops the signal while the woods doesn't. 

I'm keeping my phone in my middle jersey pocket in a ziploc bag with the screen pointing outwards. Both Verizon and Google location services are off and its just using the standalone gps. I always wait until it says GPS Signal OK before starting recording. 

Anyway, are there any tricks that I can do to try to prevent this? I'm planning on getting a Garmin eventually for the HR and cadence features, as well as gps, but until then I'd like to be able to finish a ride without pulling out my phone and seeing that the route is laughably off. 

Thanks much.


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## 9W9W (Apr 5, 2012)

It is my understanding that Strava "normalizes" your route moments after its uploaded. It does this by comparing your route with others' similar routes. So after I save my ride it is. It uncommon for it to hangs stats some time later. This is done to for the sake of accuracy. Have you ever noticed yours either shaving miles or vertical feet after you save or save and upload?


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## RaptorTC (Jul 20, 2012)

It does shave off miles after it uploads, but its still way over. Last week I did a ride with our team that came in at 29 miles for me and 23.8 miles for everyone else that uploaded it. I just checked and its still showing 29. 

I think I'm going to try putting my phone in different directions (upside down, backwards, etc) to see if one way can somehow give a little better results. Any other ideas would be great.


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## Rhymenocerus (Jul 17, 2010)

Get a Garmin if you want accurate results, its made for recieving GPS, the GPS on a phone is an afterthought. I ride with a lot of smartphone app users and more often than not they lose reception on longer segments and dont show up in the leaderboard results.


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## the_doctor (Dec 27, 2008)

RaptorTC said:


> Hey everyone, I was just wondering if someone could help me out here. About a month or so ago I got a new phone (LG Lucid) and immediately noticed that the gps tracks on Strava were no where near as accurate as they were with my old phone (Motorola Droid 2). An example is here Bike Ride Profile | I Hate My Phone grp 9-17 near Ann Arbor Charter Township | Times and Records | Strava It appears that my phone lost contact with a satellite and decided to just draw lines all willy nilly until it found another one. This resulted in my actual mileage being over by about 3 miles, which lead to my speed being off, and of course there is the laugh that is my 134mph top speed.
> 
> Oddly enough, sometimes the phone works fine. A few days ago it recorded my mtb race route correctly as well as the distance. I didn't do anything different with my phone, and I'm kind of confused how the open road drops the signal while the woods doesn't.
> 
> ...


I've ridden with a DROID 2 user on a number of times. He has the same speed # as I. However, his elevation gain is less. I suspect that his elevation gain is closer to normal.

A friend with a sigma computer has lower elevation gains. It almost seems consistent that my phone(MB502) is 1.2x greater in recorded elevation versus actual elevation.

I don't think that this is hardware issues as much as software issues.

The guys that ride with iPhones do better. On my thursday ride, which is much faster than any shop ride, we have guys on Garmins & iPhones. The Garmins & the iPhones are close in speed.

I have lower mileage and speed!! I don't know understand how it is possible. We have set a segment for the entire ride(~34 miles). 

I was right with the guys on a in-segment segment. I have something like 22.7. The other guys have 22.9.

On the rollers we have things like 24.5 versus 23.9.

Strava is not so hot!


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## RubyRoad (Sep 14, 2012)

RaptorTC said:


> It does shave off miles after it uploads, but its still way over. Last week I did a ride with our team that came in at 29 miles for me and 23.8 miles for everyone else that uploaded it. I just checked and its still showing 29.
> 
> I think I'm going to try putting my phone in different directions (upside down, backwards, etc) to see if one way can somehow give a little better results. Any other ideas would be great.


You said, that sometimes the phone works fine. Did you find any correlation between the weather and its precision? I know it is just a myth that in cloudy weather the GPS is not as accurate as in clear weather, but I only experienced inaccuracy only once, when it was very cloudy.
Also, I am not an expert, but I don't think moving your phone a few inches would really matter.


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## gte105u (Aug 12, 2012)

Many phones try to regulate the amount of power used by cycling the connection with the satellite. When I used MapMyFitness (before my Garmin 310xt) on my old Thunderbolt I would get these results some. It was much worse while running than biking. Try the app TrackerBooster. You turn it on right before you start the course in whatever GPS app you will be using (in this case Strava, when I used MapMyFitness I would set up the workout, switch over to TrackerBooster, start it, then switch back to MapMyFitness and hit start). It will drain the battery faster, but it maintains a continuous connection to the GPS and you don't get the jumps. If that doesn't work, it is probably hardware issues.


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## RaptorTC (Jul 20, 2012)

Thanks for the tip, I'll definitely try it on my next ride.


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## RaptorTC (Jul 20, 2012)

Just thought I'd post my fix to this problem just in case anyone else has similar issues and stumbles into this thread via a search. TrackerBooster didn't help, and actually made things worse as it really messed with speed values during segments.

The thing that fixed my problems was switching to recording in MyTracks with the gps rate set as small as it would go and running it with my data on. This seemed to be the magic combination as I've had 4 rides get recorded very well using this method. The only downside is having to upload the file manually to strava later. It even managed to make it 56 miles without a hiccup at all on Saturday. Linky


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## Btomp (Sep 27, 2012)

What's the process like of manually uploading from MyTracks to Strava? Lately my Strava recordings have been a little glitchy also (Samsung Galaxy S2) so I'm thinking of making the switch until I get my Garmin.

Cheers.


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## RaptorTC (Jul 20, 2012)

It's not too bad, I just save the .gpx to my SD card after the ride. After saving it the app asks if you'd like to share the gpx file so I just email it to myself. Once I get to my computer I download it from the email to my desktop and then upload it to Strava. Really its not that bad of a process, the only downside is not knowing your times on segments until you have time to make it to a computer.


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## DIRT BOY (Aug 22, 2002)

Try using another app and upload to Strava. My Garmin files and Digifit files are accurate when up loaded to Strava.


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