Irritated Garmin Edge user lookin to commiserate

[kenyonchris]

i'm debating getting a 705 or a suunto t6c. how do you guys like your 705s aside from the software issues? do you find the gps stuff handy? how's it helped your cycling?

OK WHAT THE HECK ARE YOU GUYS TALKING ABOUT???
I gather it is some sort of new fangled computer dealie. Am I behind on the times? An oldster? A techno-dwarf? I have a little computer on my mtb to tell me that i have sweated my a$$ off for 11 miles, averaging 13 mph, for 54 minutes. I have a little computer on my road bike telling me I have sweated my a$$ off for 54 miles, at 20 mph average, for two and a half hours. The road bike one has a little blinky light on it too, that I notices blinks in time with my pedal stroke.
Is there something I am missing?

[Pedal Wench]

Is there something I am missing?

The Garmin Edge will tell you exactly where you sweated your a$$ off.

I preload routes in mine (immensely valuable on brevets) and I use it as confirmation with the cue sheets. A turn-by-turn guide on the ride. Today, I was helping out at a breast cancer training walk, and I preloaded their route. Using the maps, I could easily jump ahead on the route shortcutting the walkers. On self-supported rides, I can see where there are stores for water and nature breaks.

Then, after the ride, you can see where you were, elevation profiles, speeds during the ride, heart rate and cadence placed over time or elevation or speed, etc. Fun stuff!

[kenyonchris]

The Garmin Edge will tell you exactly where you sweated your a$$ off.

I preload routes in mine (immensely valuable on brevets) and I use it as confirmation with the cue sheets. A turn-by-turn guide on the ride. Today, I was helping out at a breast cancer training walk, and I preloaded their route. Using the maps, I could easily jump ahead on the route shortcutting the walkers. On self-supported rides, I can see where there are stores for water and nature breaks.

Then, after the ride, you can see where you were, elevation profiles, speeds during the ride, heart rate and cadence placed over time or elevation or speed, etc. Fun stuff!

Hmmm. That may be too technical for me. I just figured the ipod out.

[OakLeaf]

Everything PedalWench said, plus -

With a preloaded route, it will beep when you're approaching a turn (once to warn, and again as you get very close), and tell you the name of the road and which direction you're supposed to turn onto it.

You can use it for navigation in the car, too. Although letting it design its own route from point A to point B doesn't really work all that well for cycling loops (because it has no way to take into account road conditions or how many miles you wanted to do), it works very well in the car (same algorithms they use for the car and moto GPS units), and in a pinch for just getting back to familiar territory when you're hopelessly lost. (It will avoid unpaved roads, to the best of its information, and limited-access highways, when you select those options, but it has no way to know whether a particular road is so busy and narrow that you'd rather avoid it on the bici, or whether the next road over is way more scenic.)

Even if you're relying on paper maps for navigation, it will tell you where you are and which direction you're heading, which aren't always clear from road signs.

It will give you two panes of real-time information, with your choice of 1 to 8 data fields in each: speed, cadence, power output if you have a power meter, heart rate, average of any of those over a lap or over the whole ride, grade, elevation, total distance, lap distance, total ascent or descent, sunrise time, sunset time, current time of day, elapsed time for the ride, approximate time, ETA or exact distance to your destination, approximate time, ETA or exact distance to the next turn or waypoint, heading, bearing, maximum speed, cadence or power for current lap, last lap or overall, and more...

You can save waypoints, just to remember the location of something interesting, or if you want to let the unit navigate back to a remembered place from somewhere else.

You can choose from a variety of pre-loaded workouts or program your own; it will give you a series of warning tones and then a different tone to let you know when your interval has begun and ended; it will alert when your speed, heart rate or cadence goes above or below your desired range for the interval (but not power output, apparently ), and play a little victory melody when your workout's finished.

When you upload your data into an application like SportTracks or some of the subscription services online, it will track the life of your equipment and alert you when it's nearing replacement time - how many miles on your rear tire or your cassette? How many hours on your HRM battery?

Really, how did we live without this stuff?

[BabyBlueNTulsa]

OMG! At least ten replies had been posted after my last post and TE didn't send me notification! Roar!

LOVE and appreciate all the information gals!!

I spent a good chunk last night importing Edge rides and equipment used. I added one plug-in for GPS Powertrack hoping that was the one that'd show me weather, avg MOVING speed, and gradients. I know it's supposed to extrapolate power info w/o a power meter... But I was really hoping for those other items.

Which plugins will give me the info I'm losing off MotionBased? Or do I just need to stop being lazy with the pause button (for an accurate moving avg)?

Sporttracks is looking VERY cool!!

[OakLeaf]

For weather, go to Settings:Display and enter your location.

But, I don't use that much. There have been some bugs on and off in weather data retrieval. You have to enter your location rather than it automatically choosing the weather station from your GPS location. Plus, at best, it retrieves only temperature and atmospheric conditions; and the weather stations don't appear to be very accurate. So I manually correct weather data for my rides/runs in the USA, by going to the National Weather Service, entering the zip code to get to the forecast page [best and most accurate forecasts IMO, BTW], then clicking on the "3 Day History" link at the bottom of the "Current Conditions" pane. That will give you hour-by-hour humidity and wind speed and direction, as well as temperature, precipitation and cloud cover. (Smaller airport weather stations may only report during the daytime, though.)

For moving averages, it's a two-step process. First, go to Select View:Categories:Activity Categories and choose the activity you want to edit (running, road cycling, trail cycling, etc.). For that activity, choose the pace or speed you want to count as "stopped." Then, go to Settings:Display:Analysis, and un-check "Include stopped in time & distance totals." That'll be the same pane where you edit your data smoothing preferences, too.


For displaying gradients, go to the bottom left panel in your Daily Activity window and click the triangle on the right of the title bar (defaults to Summary), to see a pull-down menu, and select Elevation. Then in the bottom window, you can use the pull-down menu to choose a display of grade or elevation against distance or time; click the little button that's an image of a graph to add more data to your graph; and click the button that's an image of a window to make the graph take the whole bottom pane rather than being divided into map and graph. With the map pane open, you can click on the map to show that point on the graph, or hover your cursor over the graph to select points along it.


Just play with SportTracks and you'll learn as you go. I know it does a lot that I don't know how to do yet. The people on the SportTracks forums are super helpful, too.

[BabyBlueNTulsa]

Thank you thank you! First major hurdles out of the way.

I'm like Mr Silver... don't much like change! LOL... but I'm fairly good with figuring out software (once I get a one or two pointers) <wink>

Pretty nifty tool!