Garmin GPS Watch as evidential speed monitor

An associate of mine alleges that he was given a speeding ticket for a speed way over his actual speed and that this was provoked by simply keeping quiet (5th amendment) during the traffic stop re other inquiries unrelated to the stop. That’s another topic but makes me wish I had a dashcam with GPS. Well, turns out that I may have a use for my defunct Android phone(s). There are some cool dashcam apps one can run on a decommissioned phone.

But the point of this thread is to demonstrate an simple way to document your speed. I tried this yesterday and had no reason to think that it would not work.

Start a Garmin GPS watch when you begin your drive. It will document exact ‘tracks’, time of day, instantaneous speed and duration of any ‘stops’ along the way without any input from the user and bluetooth in real time to the cloud through a phone. There are others brands that will do this. Garmin Connect is a great app, however for storing such data. My watch will store precise GPS tracks for about 15 hrs on a full charge.

Google has your tracks also (Android phone), like it or not. But I’m not so sure your could easily derive instantaneous speed and location data unless there was a serious legal need for this.

Here is are some tracks from yesterday’s drive.

https://connect.garmin.com/modern/activity/3032851682

Thankfully I have never had the need for either dashcam or speed data. Might have to be careful with the data. If you were speeding in another geographic area on your Garmin data, then that might be evidence that could work against you. :slight_smile:

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If this is indeed the case, it is probably worth the cost of a lawyer to fight it.

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Interesting…and good to know. I was going to donate my old Moto X, but maybe now will see what I can do with it along these lines.

Meh…probably not. Speeding tickets cost hundreds (including potential insurance premium increases), lawyers cost thousands. It may, however, be worth filing a complaint at station/city hall, just to make sure if it is happening a lot it can be noticed/tracked/investigated.

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Go to traffic school and negate the point.

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That depends upon how “a speed way over his actual speed” it was.

One time when I was coming back from COMDEX, I got stuck behind a very slow RV in a construction zone. It was down to a single lane, so I cannot pass.

When we got out of the restriction, my accelerator went to the floor. I flew as fast as I dared until I got it out of my system. A little while later, I was lit up by a DPS trooper.

He asked me to get out and sit in his car (front seat) as he called in my information. As he waited, we chatted. He asked where I was going. I said to my parents’ home in the next city to spend the night. He asked where I was coming from. I said COMDEX in Las Vegas. He asked was that why there were bags and bags of stuff in my car. I said yes.

It turned out he knew about COMDEX and was curious about it.

When my information came back, he said that because of how fast I was going, he had to cite me. But he was only going to make 14 mph over so that I can take a defensive driving class.

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Good for you for treating the LEO w/respect. It often makes those encounters win-win.

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IMO, the issue is going to be calibration. Note that on the speeding ticket the LEO calibrates the radar gun after each and every stop. There is no way to corroborate the calibration of your GPS watch.

Yes, thought about that. Although it is extremely accurate, I think a GPS log would just be helpful in situations of gross errors on the part of the police.

This is interesting info. Are you sure? It would seem that a trained technician, which I can’t believe each and every patrol officer would be, would be needed for this. Back in the day, when I beat a speeding ticket based on this very thing, very precise tuning forks were required and meticulous logs kept. Has this changed?

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Sadly, I have evidential proof of this.

:frowning:

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GPS has no reasonable calibration capability. It will either be accurate to within the positioning data available, or it will be broken.

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I understand that. My point was that it would be difficult to convince LEO that your GPS has the same accuracy as his/her radar gun.

The only thing you could do is convince a judge that you couldn’t have been as fast as the LEO said, and that the LEO might have mistaken whose speed he was taking. Which is actually fairly common

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Or jury. I know of someone who spent the time at a jury trial for an alleged running of a stop sign. It ultimately ended with a hung jury.