Originally Posted by
Sy Reene
Thanks for the info.. So does a Garmin basically just self-calibrate when it's turned on? ie. baseline from start of the ride barometric reading? If so, would turning off and on the unit and creating separate smaller "activities" help? Obviously not ideal.
As to temperature effects, this theoretically could be easily corrected for by the unit, which also has a built-in thermometer, no?
I played with Strava's elevation correction.. it would generally remove about 10% of elevation to rides i tried it on.. Annoyingly, once you apply elevation correction in Strava, I found out you can't revert (unclick) to the Edge's originally reported elevation. I presume you'd have to resend or resync the data from Garmin again.
With the Garmin 500 you can set various elevation points with a known elevation. You set the location and manually enter an altitude. For example, I have my house set as one so every time I set off the Garmin finds the elevation point based on my location and looks up the elevation point I have set and calibrates to that.
I'm not sure if it recalibrates during a ride. I wonder if I was to set a number of known points on my usual routes if the Garmin would recalibrate the altitude when I pass over them.
As for the temperature effects, I'm not so sure this would be a major problem with cycling GPS as most cyclists aren't out in sub zero temperatures. For aviation it is something to be aware of when flying in cold weather.