Duplicates, Hammerhead, Tunnels, and .. Advanced MPA

I’m having a few minor problems, which are not stopping me from enjoying xert, but here they are:

  1. Duplicate detection doesn’t work reliably. Hammerhead uploads both direct to xert and via strava and often these are not detected as duplicates. My suspicion is that if the ride is started after I get a GPS lock then it’s fine, since strava is based on GPS tracks.

  2. Deduping when it works, has a race condition :slight_smile: I’d like it to consistently choose one or the other. And that preference changes sadly - it used to be I want to prefer the direct upload in case I did an interval through a tunnel, it has accurate data and strava does not preserve power etc. without GPS points. Nowadays, I like advanced MPA and looking at segments, so I prefer strava.

So for now, I’m going for a workaround of removing xert as a connected app from Hammerhead. I hope it remembers my MPA and I can reconnect occasionally to update it. Then strava will be the source of truth, and since intervals in tunnels are rare enough, I can upload those manually.

I’m not sure what the ideal solution would be, but I wonder if duplicates could be acknowledged but kept, and allow one to analyse both activities. So then I can choose what to look at. Even better would be to be able to see the strava segments on the directly uploaded data.

There’s also possible solutions on Hammerhead side, such as having per-account selection for auto-upload, which has been requested by others there. And strava could fix their data recording (I requested this) but I’ve zero hope they will do so.

Any suggestions? Thanks for listening! Loving advanced MPA.
Duncan

It’s strange, but Strava often adjusts the start date of the activity by just a few seconds when they send us the activity. We have an improvement for duplicate activity detection in the works.

FWIW, you can still get the Strava analytics when using the file from Hammerhead, so long as the ride syncs from Hammerhead to Xert and then Xert to Strava!

Here’s a workaround you may be interested in…If I happen to be using my K2 instead of EBC for a ride, I will scroll to the bottom of the activity summary screen (on K2) at the conclusion of my ride and tap the Strava icon to exclude syncing to Strava (demonstrated in screenshot below), then save the ride. The ride is pushed from Hammerhead > Xert and then Xert > Strava with summary metrics, advanced stats (if desired), and no issues with HH/Strava duplicate activities!

Whichever activity reaches Xert first will stay. The second activity to reach Xert will always be considered the duplicate and won’t be uploaded.

This would be nice and eliminate the need for my steps outlined above :slight_smile:

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Thanks for the tips, it inspired me to work out a hack to work around this. So far so good.

First hack attempt failed: disconnecting xert from hammerhead removed the MPA field after a reboot, so that is a no go for me. I’ve re-enabled it.

Second hack attempt: I disconnected/reconnected strava from hammerhead. On reconnect, strava asks for authorization. Here I unticked permission to upload activities - leaving all the rest enabled. So far working as intended: the upload succeeds to xert and fails to strava, creating the pathway you suggested without the manual step. I managed to sync routes and segments to hammerhead, so that appears to keep working.

Thanks for the inspo :slight_smile:
Duncan

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My hack worked, but the duplicate detection still bit me. I have Easy Polar Endurance Ride (length 48:21) and Wetty McWetface (length 49:22) - even though both point to the same strava activity (seems like a good signal for a duplicate activity - just saying!) and both came from the same activity synced via xert to strava.

Analysis is pretty clear that one started later than the other. The one which started earlier has power data before the GPS track started.

Yes, interesting about the GPS track start time difference –

Start1
Start2

Hi @dunc - kindly send a note to our support team so we can take a look at this. Cheers!