Decreased vertical precision is an artefact of measurement geometry more than e.g. number of frequencies.
Horizontal position has the benefit of having satellites at almost all azimuths. But the vertical position estimate only gets satellites from at most half of possible elevations (above the horizon).
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Wish they could solve the GPS altitude weakness
Watches that use GPS for altitude are terribly inaccurate
It is interesting to run the opensource GPSTEST app on a smartphone and watch the MSL "settle" over time but each sat seems to disagree
* https://github.com/barbeau/gpstest
btw watches are now getting THREE multi-band L1+L5 GPS chipsets, should help things
quad-band GNSS coming soon too!
* https://the5krunner.com/2026/03/06/tri-band-gps-garmin/
Decreased vertical precision is an artefact of measurement geometry more than e.g. number of frequencies.
Horizontal position has the benefit of having satellites at almost all azimuths. But the vertical position estimate only gets satellites from at most half of possible elevations (above the horizon).
See "Vertical Dilution of Precision":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilution_of_precision
I guess we are using mems pressure sensors for altitude these days.