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sick_em_rex said..
Agreed, that is exactly why he was doing it.
Andrew, your points above are quite alarming as you yourself say that different programs will give varying results and even to the point that unless you have the program you use setup correctly then it also will give different results.
Correct. If the setup is wrong, the results will be wrong, or in this case may be different. Nothing unusual or new about that concept.
Fortunately, the programs come set up correctly by default. To get them to give erroneous results you would have to deliberately fiddle with the settings whilst not knowing what you were doing. Never a good idea in any software.
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sick_em_rex said..This opens a whole Pandora's box as to what programs people use and the potential for huge variances.
Not if users don't go fiddling about with settings they don't understand, and the differences potentially created are not huge at all but actually
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sick_em_rex said..This is regardless of what GPS device is being used (as evidenced by Rick's 3 identical devices ((GT31's)) using up to date firmware and getting different results for all 3).
See my previous post explaining that the differences are extremely small from identical side by side devices and easily explained.
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sick_em_rex said..What is the tolerable variance you allow for? If looking at Rick's results, there is a potential for a tenth of a knot in 2 sec speeds which could be the difference between someone breaking the desirable 40 knot barrier and not (or simply gaining a PB). I have seen people miss 40 knots by less than a tenth of a knot and I know if it was me then I'd be pretty miffed if I knew that there is potentially a program someone else is using that may not have robbed me of that tenth. I have two identical (to 3 decimal points) alpha pb's...who knows, using different software I may have bettered it???.
Yes. See the aforementioned post regarding the lower accuracy of the 2 second calculation. Common potential maximum error for two second peak speeds in the GT-31 are in the order of up to 0.25 seconds. However, it is usually less than 0.05 seconds in the hundreds of tests I have done. The 2 second category is inherently the least accurate and should be not taken too seriously.
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sick_em_rex said.. I am not a dumb person (open for debate however

) but I don't think I would know how to setup correct analysis software and I wouldn't know whether it was setup rightly or wrongly anyway. I plug my SD card into my puter and let KA72 do its thing. I think this is why so many people want to use a standard program to read all files. I don't care if it's KA72, Realspeed, GPSAR or GPS Results. Otherwise we are going to go round and round in circles and this debate will last for all of eternity.
Quite correct Andrew, you are not at all a dumb person.

You are probably just asking the same questions that other smart people are thinking. It's all good.
As I have pointed out, if you use any of the analysis programs, you don't really have to know the hows and whys of the settings. They are mostly buried where normal people won't go digging anyhow and are set of correctly by default. There are various guides and discussions you can search for and study if you really want to know about those things, but it is all unnecessary for simple plug and play analysis. Putting your SD card in your computer and letting KA-72 do it's thing to letting GPS-Results or RealSpeed or GPSAR-Pro do it's thing should always get the same results to the significant decimal point. Thats my point. I have explained in some detail in another post why there is not such thing as the concept of a single 'standard' program. It's more like there is a set of definitions of categories and specifications of implementation to calculate those things. Each software engineers might go about achieving this in a slightly different way to get the same results from good clean files. We only see significant differences in the results when the files have some types of errors and because each program deals with them in different ways, we often have to try analysing in a number of different programs to find the source of the error and see if we can get a reasonable result for that file.
Every program, including KA-72 will get rubbish results from some types of rubbish files. There is no such thing as the perfect, 'standard', never erroneous analysis software. We will always have to view any result they produce with logical, considered awareness. If it looks wrong, it probably is wrong, and we need to do deeper analysis to see if we can get a true result from it, or just bite the bullet and throw it out and try again. (Not so bad, we get to sail again!

)
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sick_em_rex said..Just a question, what is it that makes your software analysis program any better than KA72? And please try and reply in layman's terms, my brain zones out when you get all technical

None of the software programs are 'mine'. But I use them all. Refer to my answer above. None is perfect, but all do a great job with good clean files from the approved GPS devices.