billyymc

I've had MMR account for a year or so (to map routes) but just t his past week decided to try both Strava and MMR on my phone to record ride stats.

I only really care about distance and total climbing. The first ride I tried both apps on, the both got more or less the same distance - 14.75 miles for MMR, and 14.8 for Strava. Rounding.

But for the climbing Strava got quite a bit less than MMR - 1,074 vs 1,265.

Anyone have experience with which app is typically more accurate in terms of amount of climbing for a ride?

SpeshulEd 

This might be helpful:
https://strava.zendesk.com/entries/2...-Your-Activity

billyymc

Thanks SE. From reading that (without going to read MMR's site), I would gather that they use different correction methods, and have different thresholds for recording something as elevation gain.

Strava:
"How do you calculate elevation gain?

Elevation data on Strava is smoothed to take out noise— we have a 'threshold' where climbing needs to occur consistently for more than 10 meters before it is added to the total elevation gain. If we did not have this threshold, the elevation numbers would be inflated for longer activities. This gain threshold applies for both rides and runs."

rm -rf

That's interesting that MapMyRide was higher. Some years ago, before I switched to ridewithgps.com (which is way better for drawing routes and viewing recordings), I drew maps on mapmyride. They always were the lowest elevation total, since they ignored any hill less than 10 meters/33 feet high. So repeated small rollers were ignored. This sounds like what strava is doing now. I can see the arguments both ways.

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Smoothing GPS data

I'll repeat my comment from another thread:

All gps software uses smoothing. My Garmin 705 records once a second, and is accurate enough to show which side of the road I was on. But even so, there's "jitter" in recordings, and the different sites have their own way of fixing the raw data.

I have a wheel sensor feeding the Garmin, so it knows when I'm stopped. A phone GPS needs to guess, since even when stopped, the current location drifts, and it looks like you are moving at random.

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I often get three different average speeds on ridewithgps.com, strava.com and My Tourbook running on my PC.

For instance, here's 4 minutes of My Tourbook with smoothing turned off. Notice the huge Feet per Hour in yellow. In real life, I can sustain about 2000 feet per hour, and maybe 3000 for a very short hill.



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And the same thing with the smoothing settings I use. The max speed is lower. The rest of the chart looks more reasonable. And even here, the yellow feet per hour is still not right. But if I increase the smoothing even more, it just rounds off all the highs and lows too much.



My Tourbook is free software that runs on your own computer. It has tons of features for tracking rides and viewing them on maps.

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Here's a zoomed in My Tourbook map showing each one-per-second data point, color coded by speed. First, heading uphill to the top of the map, then returning downhill and turning right.

You'd think that something this accurate wouldn't need any smoothing.

cydewaze

A few weeks go I went on a ride with my wife. She has a Garmin 305, and I have a 510. Both showed completely different amounts of climbing, and when I uploaded my ride to Strava and clicked the link to adjust the elevation, it dropped almost half the amount.

I've decided that it's best not to lose too much sleep over these numbers.

billyymc

Interesting info everyone. I had really only intended to use this for bigger rides, or rides that I haven't done before. I mostly care about mileage, knowing the elevation is a nicety, anything else I really don't care about. I already put on the max privacy settings in Strava, so it's really just for me.

I'll probably try MMR and Strava and ridewithgps all on an upcoming ride and then just make a decision knowing none are perfect.

Smokehouse

Strava/MMR sucks on a phone, or at least my phones. I've used it on an iPhone 4s, 5, and 5s...all are horribly inaccurate vs my Garmin 500.

I did a 75 mile ride with some friends and at the end, my phone showed 1516' of elevation, their Garmin units, give or take, all showed 2450' (ish)...after that I bought a Garmin.

PepeM

How do you know the Garmins were more accurate?