After 3 years of first reporting: Ascent / Climb still completely wrong
Hello HH,
I still notice absolute wrong ascent values using the Karoo2.
I always thought problems exist especially when riding through the woods with bad GPS and/or rough terrain with a lot of mini up's/down's.
Yesterday I did a ride and noticed that even on a open and flat/downhill road the ascent meteres were rising like hell every couple of seconds.
--> To the end of the ride I had double as much ascent-meters as my separate Suunto-Baro-Watch & Strava show (2560m instead of 1176m).
Please: Finally find a solution. The ascent bugs have been reported more than 3 years ago.
In clear language: the K2 in the current state is simply not usable / trustable
Example --> going downhill:
Start
2 seconds later
29seconds later
40seconds later
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I do get climbs popping up that aren't really climbs, false flats etc, maybe this is a norm that it measures the overall change in D+ over the whole ride. I'm also getting paused once in a while when riding or if I stop and the auto pause goes on it doesn't go back into ride mode on its own. no big deal but....
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The reason is a faulty component responsible for measuring pressure, motion and temperature - one sensor for 3 measurements.
The temperature is also measured incorrectly.
Someone who knows about the equipment has already described it somewhere in one of the posts.
No one from HH will officially write the truth, because they would have to withdraw the entire production from the market, which would mean bankruptcy. Replacing a component is also out of the question.
When I want to know the current slope, I ask my wife, when I want the exact temperature, I ask my wife, when I want to know the exact elevation, I ask my wife, she luckily has a Sigma Rox 10 all the time.
It's sad but true. -
New owner of a K2 here. I've owned the K2 for about 6 weeks or so now. I've known about the elevation discrepancies between what the K2 calculates and what Strava calculates, but still went ahead and bought the K2 as the difference (though not insignificant) will not necessarily "ruin" my riding experience.
At the end of the day, dare I say most of us are not dependent on having very accurate data - as in it won't stop us from riding. I know we all want to have as accurate information as possible. Here is my data for the 16 rides I've completed so far.
An important point to note is that none of the routes are complicated MTB trails that are not mapped in Strava. Every single route here is mapped on Strava and RideWithGPS.
In summary, the data can be off by as much as 26% (the K2 "padding" the numbers ) and in one instance it was under by 29%. I consider that data point an outlier, however the rest of the discrepancies confirm what you read online about this Achilles heel of the K2.
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Hi all,
yesterday during a ride my ascent was again running amok, every couple of seconds gaining 10-20metres. Result: nearly 2500m "wrong ascent" on 25km ride with maximum 400m of "real ascent".
I took the time and did some tests, as some people reported that taking out the SIM-Card would "solve" the problem.
I had the impression, that it is not necessary to take out the SIM from the device; when simply disabling the Mobile Data in the quick menu, the running away of the ascent-metres stopped instantly.
This shows that the altitude/ascent-problem is directly linked to the active internet-connection.
@Hammerhead: Why is it not possible to simply look into your SW-function which calculates the ascent and why & what the internet-connection is used for. Then either
- implement a sanity check (internet data vs. the physical barometer signal ) OR
- disable the internet-subfunction for calculation the ascent and only use the measured Barometer- and GPS-height
Note 1: changing the calibration mode from auto to manual had no improvement-effect in my test
Note 2: disabling the Mobile data is not a solution since I want to use Live Tracking
After years of having height/ascent-problems reported by a lot of users, it is simply not understandable why Hammerhead is not fixing this problem (but instead working on minor topics like "data field design")
BR, Andreas
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Maybe there are several problems causing the effects described by users:
a) general wrong (inaccurate) ascent
b) massive running away of ascent data from time to time / not in every ride
--> I just did a new direct request to Hammerhead since I have the Impression nobody from HH is reading / answering the community posts
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the elevation is constantly going up and down by 5-10m on mine so it adds up over time...that was confirmed by Hammerhead after I sent them the .fit files with the wrong ascents...surely they can fix this by changing sampling rates or something?
It may have got worse after people complained that the slope grade % was incorrect and they corrected that calculation in a firmware release...who knows
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Did a long 110km gravel ride in unknown territory yesterday and my total ascent on the Karoo was 2228m ...got home and uploaded to Strava which corrected it to 1490m [my Apple watch was 1455m]
I thought I could live with this issue on my local rides where I know the ascent, but on a new ride it really is not cool to have to wait till one gets home to find out the total ascent.
Hammerhead will send me a replacement unit to see if it changes anything and if it does it definitely means this is a hardware issue...so all those users out there hoping for a software resolution are going to be disappointed...
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