But anyone who’s used GPS tracking knows the frustration: phantom detours through buildings you never entered, distance calculations that seem wildly off, or route lines that zigzag across the map like a drunken spider.
These aren’t just annoying quirks. They’re fundamental challenges that every GPS tracking app must solve. Your phone’s GPS receiver is constantly battling interference from buildings, trees, tunnels, and atmospheric conditions. Without smart filtering, these imperfections can turn your actual route into a mess of inaccurate data.
At Map My Tracks, we’ve developed a sophisticated algorithm that works behind the scenes to ensure your recorded activities are as accurate as possible. Here’s how we tackle the GPS accuracy challenge.
Your smartphone receives signals from satellites orbiting thousands of miles above Earth. While this technology is remarkable, it’s far from flawless. GPS signals can bounce off buildings, get blocked by dense foliage, or struggle to penetrate cloud cover. Your phone might think you’ve travelled 50 metres when you’ve actually been standing still, or register your speed as 30 mph when you’re walking at a normal pace.
Raw GPS data, left unprocessed, would create activity recordings full of errors, overstated distances, and routes that don’t reflect reality. The solution? Intelligent filtering that separates signal from noise.
1. Smart update intervals: Different activities, different needs
The challenge: Recording GPS points at the same rate for all activities is inefficient and inaccurate. Sample too frequently during a slow walk and you’ll capture mostly GPS noise. Sample too infrequently during a fast bike ride and you’ll miss important turns and route details.
Our solution: Map My Tracks dynamically adjusts how often it records GPS points based on your activity speed. When you’re walking, we capture a GPS point every 8 seconds. This is frequent enough to track your route accurately without overwhelming the data with noise from small movements. When you’re cycling or moving faster, we increase the frequency to every 2 seconds, ensuring we capture every twist and turn of your route.
This adaptive approach means you get the right level of detail for whatever you’re doing, without wasting battery life or cluttering your route with unnecessary data points.
2. Speed reality checks: Filtering the impossible
The challenge: GPS glitches can make your phone think you’ve suddenly teleported hundreds of metres away, resulting in recorded speeds that would make a fighter jet jealous. These errant points can dramatically inflate your distance and ruin your statistics.
Our solution: Map My Tracks analyses each GPS point and calculates what your speed would need to be to reach it from your previous position. If that speed is unrealistic for human powered movement, say 100 mph during a jog, we know the GPS reading is faulty and we simply omit that point from your recording.
This reality check ensures that momentary GPS hiccups don’t corrupt your entire activity log. Your recorded route stays true to where you actually went, and your distance and speed statistics remain reliable.
3. Accuracy thresholds: Quality over quantity
The challenge: Not all GPS readings are created equal. Your phone reports a “horizontal accuracy” value with each GPS point. This is essentially an estimate of how confident it is about your location. A GPS point might claim you’re at a specific spot, but with an accuracy of only 100 metres, meaning you could actually be anywhere within a 100 metre radius.
Our solution: Map My Tracks sets a strict quality standard. We only accept GPS points with a horizontal accuracy of 50 metres or better. If your phone reports a less accurate reading, often because of poor satellite visibility or signal interference, we wait for a better quality point before recording your position.
This quality filter ensures that every point in your recorded route meets a minimum reliability standard, keeping those frustrating “phantom detours” to a minimum.
4. Motion detection: Using all your phone’s sensors
The challenge: GPS alone doesn’t know whether you’re actually moving or standing still. You might be waiting at a traffic light, but GPS drift can make it look like you’re wandering around. GPS drift consists of small variations in reported position even when stationary.
Our solution: Map My Tracks doesn’t rely solely on GPS. We also tap into your device’s accelerometer and other motion sensors to detect whether you’re genuinely moving. If these sensors indicate you’re stationary, we can intelligently pause recording or filter out GPS drift, preventing those telltale “blobs” of accumulated false movement when you’re actually standing still.
By combining GPS data with motion sensing, we create a more complete picture of your activity that’s true to real world movement.
These four techniques work together seamlessly, processing every GPS signal your phone receives through multiple layers of intelligent filtering. The result is a recorded activity that accurately represents where you went, how far you travelled, and how fast you moved, without the frustrating artefacts that plague unfiltered GPS data.
Whether you’re tracking a competitive race, exploring new trails, or simply recording your daily walks, Map My Tracks gives you the confidence that your data is as accurate as modern GPS technology allows. Because your activities matter, and they deserve to be recorded right.
Ready to experience GPS tracking done right? Download Map My Tracks and see the difference intelligent algorithms make.
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