January 17, 2024
You’re enjoying a relaxing bike ride along a riverside cycle track, say, where the duck squawks add to the calming countryside vibe of it all. Then all of a sudden the komoot voice tells you to make a U-turn. You check the map on your phone and sure enough, you’ve left the route line and are now charting your own course. The route you planned does indeed hang a left turn 200 meters back. You backtrack, make the turn, komoot shuts up and all's right with the world again. But how did komoot know you’d left the route?
In a word (or acronym, if we’re being precise): GPS. Global Positioning System. Throw in some math calculations, your smartphone, and a bunch of satellites whizzing around space, and komoot will know if you’re on the right track or not. That’s the simplified version, but our routing engineer, Arne assures me that’s all the detail we need, so here goes.
At any given moment there are hundreds of satellites in the earth’s orbit, each one transmitting signals with information about its position. These signals get beamed down to earth and if they’re above you, your phone will receive them.
With information about the satellites’ positions, it’s possible to calculate your location on earth, using a sophisticated version of triangulation. The more signals your phone receives, i.e. the more satellites there are above you in any given moment, the more accurately your position can be calculated.
All smartphones have a built-in GPS computer in them, which is the same as any antenna-free GPS device, from watches to your bike computer. It’s the small but mighty computer within your phone that uses the information from the satellites to calculate where you are on the planet, and rates how accurate these calculations are. Is it accurate to within 10 meters, or could you be anywhere within a 15, 20 meter radius or more?
Engineers like Arne are responsible for programming komoot so that it can use the GPS information your smartphone calculates about your location, and place you on the komoot map. Likewise, if the accuracy data suggests the calculated position is too inaccurate to be useful (in komoot’s case, if the accuracy radius is greater than 10 meters) a red circle will appear around your position when you’re navigating a route. If there’s a circle around your position on the map, it indicates the data is too inaccurate to be reliable, so komoot will cease trying to navigate for you. If you’re still in the planning stages, the circle will be blue.
The reasons for these inaccuracies are manyfold. Satellites have natural down time (they break like anything else) making the overall positioning less accurate. Then you have environmental factors that affect the accuracy of your smartphone’s calculations. For example, water reflects signals causing the information to get scrambled, and tall trees or thick clouds can physically block signals, preventing the information from reaching your phone… if your position on the komoot map appears to be in the lake, instead of alongside it, this is why.
If you take anything away at all, make it this: Your smartphone’s GPS is just as effective as any GPS computer. As long as you’re not headed into extreme environments where weather conditions can change dramatically fast (such as a tall mountain top where thick cloud can roll in unexpectedly), rest assured you have a reliable navigation system in komoot and your phone.
Interested in how komoot works? This article explains how komoot’s routing works so you know what to look out for when planning your next route: “Why Am I Hiking on a Road?” and Other Routing Mysteries Solved