Garmin 910 Trivial PSA

William Jenks

We have an outdoor pool here in the summer (LCM), and just for laughs, I put my Garmin 910 on Open Water mode to see what would happen.

FAIL.

The bottom line is that the thing picks up and loses the GPS frequently, and especially can't hold GPS when your arms are under water.  In a real open water swim, this doens't matter much.  It just tracks the points that it picks up and (presumably) interpolates.  However, in a pool, when you're going back and forth, it's pretty much useless.

I swam about 600 m before I turned it off.  (Well, actually, there was a lightning storm coming so we had to get out.)  I was doing some drills in warmup, so the hand-done splits are pretty slow, but you'll see from the map that it knows I was in the pool (choose "satellite"), but there's no indication that I went more than one time out and back. It has a total distance of 0.09 mile = 0.09 x 1600 m = ~150 m, which doesn't even make sense with the map.

Bottom line...the pool setting thing works fine...but stick to "open water" for real open water only.

 http://connect.garmin.com/activity/344853072

bmr94539

Yeah, my open water spot here has a swim area that you are supposed to swim in that is only 200 meters long or so. I use the open water setting there, but it's not particularly good for even doing longer laps like that. When I look at the files later they look pretty bad and the distances I see at the end of the laps are super variable.

Nemo Brauch

Too funny. I just recently tested this as well and found the same type of results. Had a chuckle when it had me swimming on land for a little while.