Have researched the Garmin 810 users forum and it appears there is a lot of unhappy users. I know that a large percentage of users will only post is they are having problems. In other words happy users are'nt motivated to report on forums like those with problems so my question to users here is are the bugs out of the 810? I'm primarily interested in "live tracking".

FWIW, we use the Glympse app for live tracking when needed. Free and totally independent of our Garmins and so not reliant on a bluetooth connection and any BT associated power draw on the phone.

The BT power draw might be less than the GPS power draw on the phone.

Good point. I was wondering... I have run Glympse on 4 hr rides and it did use battery but not much, less the 20% on the Galaxy S4. Part of that is for the GPS receiver and part for sending the data to cell towers which it would still be doing with a 510 or 810. So...I don't know which would be less.

The GPS receivers on cell-phones are notorious for battery consumption. BT doesn't appear to be as much of a problem (it does consume some extra, obviously).

The GPS on the Garmin is going to be better (more accurate). And, if you are running the Garmin anyway, it makes some sense to send the GPS data to the phone too.

I believe the Android apps can turn the GPS on and off (which means such an app would consume much less power). As far as I understand, iOS (Apple) doesn't let apps do that. Of course, if the app is turning the GPS periodically, it can't record an accurate track.

Any tracking facility (an app or the Garmin) is going to have to use the cell-network to report back (so the power consumed is going to be the same for both). Though, that reporting doesn't have to happen very often (so the energy usage is reduced).

For me, the interesting feature of the 810 is the ability to send courses to it from your phone (that might be a useful feature when travelling).

All good points. However, Glympse doesn't record tracks or data, but only shows your position (and speed if you enable it) in real time, so accuracy isn't that crucial, which may be why phone battery drain isn't that bad on the Galaxy. By comparison, if I use the phone to stream music, the battery goes down much quicker, and that's with wired earbuds. Less than 20% battery usage for a 4 hr ride is adequate for my purposes.

Glympse is basically recording tracks/data but at a low data rate.

Glympse is using the GPS to determine location and it needs to determine location more than once to get the speed. It hopefully has some interest in being fairly accurate.

Android (as far as I understand) allows apps to turn the GPS on and off and Glympse is likely (very reasonably) taking advantage of that.

What it probably does is turn on the GPS every 15 minutes for a few minutes (or less). That might be good enough for reporting your position.

The tracking that the Garmins do provides the Glympse tracking as well as the detailed track recording.

(Just to be clear, I'm not saying Glympse is bad. It just doesn't do the same thing as the Garmins. If Glympse does what you need, you clearly don't need a garmin! I'm just talking about how they work. Not talking about which is better.)

I have been generally happy with my Garmin 810. Battery life is not an issue for the Garmin or my cell phone for rides of 3-4 hours. I had no problems with Live Track that could not be attributed to user error until the latest firmware update. Since then, Live Track has been unreliable - sometimes works fine, but often stops recording at variable times into the ride. I have not checked for a firmware update in the last couple of weeks, so I don't know if it has been fixed, but I did previously receive an email from Garmin support acknowledging the problem and that they are working on it.

Edit: There is a new firmware update. Downloading now. Hope it fixes the problem.

Perhaps it's semantics, but Glympse reports your current position and speed (possibly based on the time between successive positions) but does not save all these coordinates for a ride on the phone or web and does not generate a track you can view or file to download. It only shows current position, hence I say that it doesn't record tracks or data.

I have several Garmins (non 810 or 510 versions) and they do what I want, which is record tracks and ride data creating files I can save, view or further analyze. Glympse serves a different purpose, to report my current position to interested observers (spouse, next of kin, whatever).

No, it's not "semantics". It has to work this way.

A GPS datum is just a position associated with a time.

You need two data points (at least) to get speed and direction. (A compass is an alternative way to get direction but electronic compasses are not common.)

The hard part is getting the data. It's easy to record it.

The only important difference between Glympse and a track-recorder is the frequency of data (coordinates) collection. (Whether or not they save the data is a trivial difference.)

* If you don't need the detailed recorded-track, then what Glympse does is going to use less power.

* If you need the detailed recorded-track, then what the Garmin 810 does is (likely) going to use less power.

It takes some time for a GPS unit to start aquiring good data. With assisted GPS (aGPS), cell-phones can often get a lock on an accurate position more quickly. That feature would be quite useful to an app that turned-on the GPS periodically.

The Garmin 810/510 do both these things at once. Though, I don't see a big advantage of what they do over what you are doing with the 800 and Glympse separately except if you wanted to use an iPhone.

Thanks for all replies. Got a little beter understanding of glympse. What cell phone is needed to have glympse? Also Altbrewer, how did the update work for you? Your problem is the same as my friends with his 810 which he has not gotten solved yet. I just want to let the wife know where I am so if I'm stopped for a long time or change my route to a longer ride, she wont be wonderin what happened and calling me. Also will any blue tooth capable cell phone work with the 810?

It is possible for a GPS receiver determine velocity via doppler shift of the satellite signals, which doesn't need two positions and times. It's a bit complicated but that is why I said speed was determined is "possibly based on the time between successive positions". Here's a good writeup on it: https://www.aprs.net/vm/gps_cs.htm

Agree, the hard part is done, position/time points are determined. But Glympse only provides a website with a map showing the current location being reported. It only shows the current position, not any previous positions, so no track. The spatial and time coordinates are not there, just a graphic map. You would have to write software of some sort to interpret the map and figure out the coordinates. Sounds pretty hard to me. Or maybe you could get the author to provide coordinates in some way.

Of course the easy way to do this is to use and app like Strava or MMR, etc, which do record tracks and data.

Yes, there's the doppler shift stuff (forgot about that).

https://www.kowoma.de/en/gps/positioning.htm

It's not clear which method is used.

https://nujournal.net/HighAccuracySpeed.pdf
https://continuouswave.com/ubb/Forum6/HTML/002179.html

I suspect that "consumer grade" GPS don't use doppler.

It shows the current position on a map, doesn't it? A track is just a list of multiple "current" positions (connected by line segments). If you can show one position on a map, it's easy to show any number of them. Dealing with just one point simplifies things like data storage.

I'd guess that Glympse is choosing to keep things simple so they don't have to pursue these established "big guns" and match features. That is, they are occupying the niche of providing simple location (a niche that doesn't have a lot of competition).

I have only used LiveTrack once since the update and it worked. That's only one data point, and it sometimes worked before the update. Documentation for the update did not mention this as a problem that was fixed. I think LiveTrack only works with an iPhone or Android app.