A person with two watches is never sure (part 2)

Another Cycle in the City ride today, and once more I rode it with three apps running: MapMyRide, RideWithGPS, and Strava.

I’ve decided I pretty much have no use for MapMyRide. I’m tired of its shoving UnderArmour ads at me, and I’m unimpressed with the graphs and statistics that count all time, not just moving time, in the speed average and that insist my speed never drops below 5 MPH even when I’m stopped. In the below screen grab I stopped for about four minutes on Comstock, around 00:25:00, but it shows my speed near constant at 10 MPH at that time.

RideWithGPS turns out to have its own wonkiness, though. I’ve noticed it dealing ungracefully with GPS dropouts. Today there was a whopper:You notice the speed plot (black line, bottom) does show my stop on Comstock, but, no, I did not teleport from E Colvin into the Manley South Lot and back to Colvin again (mapped route), and I’m pretty sure I did not shoot up to a speed of 60 MPH (speed plot).

Strava says:The GPS dropout is evident in the useless power curve (black line, bottom) where it suddenly becomes a smooth straight line, but aside from a small speed glitch at the end of the dropout the mapped route and the speed plot (blue line) at that point seem plausible. Of course, a little earlier, during my stop on Comstock, it shows me traveling a few hundred feet at zero MPH. Still as far as GPS data handling goes, I’d say Strava’s the clear winner.