As a little birthday present my wife bought me the Garmin Edge 500, which has recently been discounted due to the arrival of the new Garmin 800 (which is just too geeky for my needs). So far I am really loving it. Last night I went out for a short post-sickness ride to get things back in order after a few weeks of inaction and health troubles.
The whole slew of stats are great for tracking fitness, planning routes, focusing on improvement and monitoring effort.
I see I will be having lots of fun with this.
I used Garmin 500 for my cycling around Taiwan. I liked it very much but it did malfunction twice.
ReplyDeleteOne was I once forgot to upload my data to Garmin Connect website at night, and the next morning the machine would not reset all the counters to zero. When I tried to do it manually, the machine hung up and stayed on the same useless screen the whole day. I couldn't even turn it off. Only after the battery drained out did the machine turned itself off. I then recharged it at night and it came back to life. Of cause, it didn't record anything for that day. Fortunately I carried a Dakota 20 GPS as a backup and did get the cycling data from it.
The second problem was that the machine is not very waterproof. When I was in Yilan (宜蘭) the rain came down hard. I left the machine mounted on the handlebar thinking it was waterproof because that's what you expect from a GPS for outdoor activities. Well, the machine later complained about the lack of battery juice and turned itself off even though I had charged it overnight the night before. The machine finally came back up that evening and showed it still had 88% of battery power. So next time when it rained, I took it off its mount on the handle and put it away somewhere in a plastic bag.
Thanks for the input.
ReplyDeleteAndrew, very impressive coming off the asthma and meds!!!
ReplyDeleteI have had my Garmin 500 for a few months now and love it. I like being able to monitor my cadence and heart rate on bike and looking at all the cool stats at the end of a ride. I have modified my display now to not show the percentage grade of hills (you can imagine) psychological I guess. I have also ridden in the rain and have had no problems with mine, I maybe getting lucky though.
Sounds like you are on your way back, never a doubt!