I bought the Garmin Forerunner 205 and it’s really cool. But last night, after my ride, I hit (what I thought was) the “stop” button and came inside an all evidence of the ride I’d just been on was gone.
Did I hit reset accidentally? Does pressing “mode” do that? I know it was recording during the ride. Is there some too-easy thing I pressed to erase the ride info?
I have a Garmin. You need to press at least two buttons in sequence to clear important records. It will be in there somewhere.
Hook it up to your software and see if the ride appears there. It should still be in the memory as Mikefule and gkmac mentioned.
I have the 305. The only weird thing mine has done is last Sunday, while JC and I were Cokering the Portland Bridge Pedal, I was fumbling with the bottons and got a “low battery emergency shutdown” warning, or something like that. I turned it back on and all was fine, just re-started the timer and it continued on as if nothing happened.
I thought maybe the battery was low because I had used it for about 4 hours of Summer Skiing on Mt. Hood the day before. The battery had plenty of charge left and no problems for the rest of the weekend.
Apparently (after reading the manual - there’s an idea!) if one presses “mode” and “lap” buttons at the same time, the thing shuts down immediately. I think I may have accidently done this.
The ride was not in the history. I was a very non-epic ride, so it’s no big deal.
further questions about the Garmin Forerunner 205
I’ve noticed some strange goings on with the elevations recorded by my new GPS.
When I upload to the Garmin software, the elevation change (of last night’s ride) was 1600 ft or so. The ride was a hilly muni ride, but I didn’t think there was nearly that much vertical change.
Then, worse still, when I go to motionbased.com, the ride stats say 2600 vertical. Does anyone else get a discrepency between the Garmin uploaded vertical and the motionbased uploaded vertical?
I haven’t compared Garmin to Motion Based yet. Last Saturday’s ride involved a 3 mile ride (at least JC rode it, for others it involved some hiking) up the fire road with approx 1000+ feet elevation gain . The rest of the ride was 3-4 miles of downhill, mostly under heavy tree cover.
The cumulative elevation gain/losss couldn’t have been more than 1,300 feet by my 305 says over 3,000 feet of ascent and descent. Satelite based elevation is clearly not accurate in heavy tree cover. But, the track looks pretty good.
The elevation feature via the Garmin GPS (or pretty much any GPS) is not super accurate. It seems to be LEAST accurate on long relatively flat rides. If you’re doing a ride with big hills, it’s more accurate. In all cases, the default technology over-estimates the actual elevation you’ve climbed or descended.
MotionBased has a “elevation correction” option called MB Gravity, which helps a lot but is still not fully accurate. But it’s a bunch more accurate. I’ve seen it actually take 1,000 feet plus off of my original data, where I had done a 20+ mile very flat ride that Garmin said involved 1,400 feet of climbing. You can select it after uploading your ride, under Activity Options.
It could be that the reason you’re seeing two different figures is that your MotionBased setup is applying MB Gravity be default. Are the MB numbers always lower than your Garmin Training Center numbers? If so, that’s the likely cause.
Actually, the MB fihure has been up to 1000 ft MORE Than the Garmin number. Odd. I’ll check ou thte MB Gravity thing.
There’s a lot of good info in this thread about elevation innacuracies, particularly with the Garmin Forerunner in mind.
STM
If none of that helps, I work at Halfords, I could always ask one of the guys downstairs who’s a specialist in this field any questions you might need answering?
I have a Garmin forerunner 301 that I got for running and I find it quite accurate. I also find that it is virtually impossible to reset without holding for 5 seconds or more. The elevation numbers seem to be quite good sofar and I love the features.
I do think that it sucks that you buy that expensive of a peice of equipment and then have to pay to upgrade your subscription to Motionbased.