Discussion: GPS punching with UsynligO

As an experiment, the courses for the Mendon Solo event have been uploaded to UsynligO. If you're feeling adventurous and want to give GPS punching a try, download UsynligO to your phone. Click Events and Mendon should show up in the search. (You might have to expand the search radius if you're farther away.)

Some caveats:
1. I don't know what I'm doing and it might not work. In particular I'm not sure if this map is georeferenced so we'll know better after we try it out.
2. If it does work, you will probably have to do the loops in their correct numerical order to make this work.
3. For the score-O there might be more setup work required.

This was all last-minute seat-of-the-pants. I'm hopefully going to do a course today and see what I can learn.

I recommend setting the punching radius to at least 25m and that the minimum accuracy be 100m.

I've had the most success with that configuration.

Thanks, Greg. That was good to know. I learned a lot from trying it out. Most importantly that if flags have been hung then you have to decide if you're running to the flags or running to get the beep from the gps app. Because the flag and the gps coordinates aren't always at the same location, for various reasons. But that's why experimenting is useful.

It’s really fun. I set my phone to 25m. But, need to be sure in the right spot for livelox. It works backwards too!

Greg---Why did you go with 100m? I believe the default is 200m.

Chris Gkikas and I had a discussion about it. I believe the "minimum" is deceptive. I have guessed the app throws away the GPS data if the reported accuracy is greater than the threshold. So if you're under canopy, and the GPS reports 150m accuracy, a 100m setting means you won't be able to punch. His standard recommendation has been a control radius of 35m (which is annoying if you have good signal, but nice if you're under trees), and a "minimum accuracy" of 200m. Also, "Store Trace" "ON"---everyone wants to see your tracks! (Although I've only seen my own so far.)

Chris's experience was with 20m accuracy. He was on a steep hillside, and UsynligO did not give the punch. He switched to 200m and it punched immediately.

I ran the Mendon score-O with UsynligO. This was my first time using it and I left all the settings at default, which was 15m punching radius and 20m accuracy. It missed 6 of the 18 controls. The flag for control 109 was hung at the very edge of the control circle rather than the center. I went to the center of the control circle (or as near as I could navigate) and it beeped for that one.
Back home, I exported the gpx file from UsynligO and overlaid the track onto a base map using OOMapper. For a couple of the missed punches the trace is within the control circle, but evidently more than 15m from the center. Increasing punching radius would probably have caused it to pick up all but one or two of the controls.
Start and finish did not seem to work. Usynligo said I was more than 200m from the S/F when I tapped "start" and I had to confirm that I really wanted to start from there. Same thing happened when I finished, so now I'm wondering if the xml file that was uploaded to the server had a different S/F location than what's shown on the score-O map.

On my 2nd outing with it, a week ago, I forgot to change the settings so I accidentally ran with 25m radius and 20m accuracy. It worked well in more open areas but several times I arrived at center of circle in denser forest and no beep. A few times I ran back and forth a bit and that worked. What often worked even better was to pull the phone out of the fanny pack I was carrying it in and hold it up. I believe cedarcreek's explanation above is likely correct. That the app's calculation of gps accuracy needs to improve below what you have that setting at before a punch will register, even if you're in the exact right spot. So be sure to use 100m or even 200m there as suggested above.