How accurate is the Nokia N82 gps?
The whole thing of distance has always fascinated me. Tracking distance may be old school. (Most elite athletes track training time) but for us age groupers, it is always interesting.
I once read that when Polar were researching the development of the footpod. They concluded that most sub elite/age groupers (their target market) weren’t too bothered about GPS (and also some people run in heavily wooded areas also…) but how they performed over the same course. I think the footpod uses some type of micro-ball bearing technology to measure distance.
So I decided to run a test.
The distance to the lane near my house is 2.4 Km (For American readers, thats a mile and a half).
So I ran at a very easy pace with my footpod AND the Nokia N82. (Feeling a little weighed down..)
Here are the results
The footpod showed 2.1km, a max speed of 10.6km/hour and an average of 8.1km/hour
The Nokia N82 2.8km (and some deviations into the surrounding fields also…)
An average speed of 10.4km/hour and a max of 56km/hour. (No I’m not that fast – presumably, it was jumping over a puddle?)
The Nokia results are here
http://sportstracker.nokia.com/nts/workoutdetail/index.do?id=243643
So which is right?
Probably neither – and that’s why elite athletes probably don’t measure distance…
I also used the Nike Sport band – I have got a little further with getting it to work but suffice to say it didn’t. A future post will follow…
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- roadrunning.net » Nike Plus sportband - More thoughts | July 24, 2008
What frustrates me the most is gps watches having crazy anamolies on elevation. They should be able to install some parameters in the software to rule out any changes of x amount of feet/meters within a given time fram.
Also, way too many people think their Garmin is 100%, I always get a chuckle out of that.
“The distance to the lane near my house is 2.4 Km (For American readers, thats a mile and a half).”
What about English readers? Don’t we still have miles here?
JogBlog’s last blog post..Salomon XT Wings Challenge – the end
The great thing about the British is that if I had put that it was 2642 yards – most of us would have gone “huh?”
(hat tip for spotting this one)