Why my location is not accurate sometimes?

Environmental Factor and GPS Drift can impact the accuracy of locations and activities on your device.

What are Environmental Factors?

Buildings, bridges, trees, steel, interference

Not enough satellites in line of sight

Position of satellites

Use indoors or underground

Multipath: signals reflected off buildings or walls

Radio interference or jamming

Major solar storms

Temporary gaps in coverage

What is GPS Drift?

GPS drift, in the most practical sense, is the difference between your actual location and the location recorded by a GPS receiver. Consumer-grade GPS receivers are not 100% accurate, this will usually cause a difference between where you are and where your GPS receiver believes you are. The GPS location accuracy of our device outdoor is around 5~20 meters, 95% of the time.  

What causes GPS drift?

GPS drift is most often caused by reflections or shadowing on an image. It can also be due to atmospheric conditions which alter throughout the day, being most pronounced in the early morning or late afternoon. Due to the sun’s low angle relative to the atmosphere, there is more atmospheric interference.

Examples of GPS Drift and Environmental Factors

Example 1: GPS Indoors

The image below shows a GPS device that was turned on and recording in a building. This illustrates what it would look like if you were to record GPS while standing still in a highly degraded GPS environment.

Example 2: Stopping During an Activity

This image shows a user that stopped for a short amount of time without pausing his activity. You can see that the device continued to record GPS points while the person was stopped. This added some additional distance to their activity.

Example 3: GPS Distortion Caused by Environmental Factors

In the example below, the device was updating locations in an area known as an "Urban Canyon". Urban Canyons cause degraded signal due to poor visibility of the horizon and GPS signal refraction caused by windows on taller buildings. When signal is very degraded, the GPS accuracy of your device goes down.