Change list from version 2.8:
copyright Trek
I haven’t been writing for long time, so now it’s time to catch up with some backlog. Not much happened on the GPS for cyclists market recently, but we are just after Tour de France and the biggests are starting to show products for 2010. Trek with Lance as its main marketing weapon presented a new series of Madone bikes. Bikes are cool, there is a lot of newness and changes in construction of carbon frames, but I focused on one detail.
Changes made from version 2.70 to 2.80:
* Restructured activity logging to reduce the number of invalid TCX files.
* Corrected issues from 2.70 that could possibly corrupt the ‘History’ directory.
* Removed potential spikes in the power data after periods of coasting.
* Increased the allowable digits in the ‘vertical to point’ field to 4.
* Increased the allowable digits in the ‘calories’ field to 5.
* Updated translations.
Below original list of changes from version 2.60 to version 2.70:
- Improved data recording in once per second mode
- Added ability to set averaging method for power and cadence
- Removed cadence filtering for power meters
- Made improvements to try to prevent spurious Auto Pauses
- Fixed distance and bearing display to work on Saved Rides list
- Fixed issue with trying to read files that start with ‘.’ that caused problems with Mac communication
- Fixed issue where random characters were displayed in list before course names loaded
- Fixed issue with speed targets not working properly in Advanced Workouts
- Fixed occasional issue where a corrupted history file could be created
- Added Venezuela and Australia-Lord Howe Island time zones
- Updated automatic Daylight Saving Time for Auckland, New Zealand, time zone
I have an interesting video for all of You interested in how a start of the marathon look like from rider’s view. What has that to do with GPS? If You enable subtitles in the video, You’ll see. It was used ATC2K camera and Garmin Edge 705 and No. 321 biker 
Happy viewing!
In the last post I described the problem which each Edge 705 user encounters, such user who tries to treat the calories value given by the Edge seriously as a burned during a training. From my experience I can tell that this value is too high and discorrelated with HR measurement. In an extreme case it may therefore turn out that going 20km/h against the wind and you burn as many calories as when you’re seated on the couch. For this reason, I decided to find a solution of this issue. With little effort you can now solve the problem with miss-counting burned calories in Garmin algorithm and have a more interesting data analysis. I decided to rely on Polar algorithm which is the most reliable for me (if at all, you can talk about this without measuring the power). After getting acquainted with files generated by the Polar CS400 and CS600 (probably all of Polars are so) it turned out that in Polar file (*. HRM) the number of burned calories wasn’t saved. The calories are shown in the device and in software, so device (e. g. Polar CS400) and software (e. g. Polar ProTrainer) calculate themselves the number of burned calories based on data form the file. Well now, you just copy the file from Garmin Edge to Polar software and it will generate the number of calories based on HR. Continue reading
Since I started using my Garmin Edge 705, I noticed that the amount of calories burned during training has significantly increased. It’s weird and I didn’t know how to explain energy expenditure increased by 40% because the receiver doesn’t weigh 20 kilograms and air resistance is not increased as much after the installation of Garmin GPS receiver. Then I realised, that probably Edge counts those calories wrong. So I did a test. I wore for my training 2 heart rate monitor bands and took both – Garmin GPS and Polar CS 400 with me too. And what turned out after the training? It was 1100 kcal in Polar and 1800 kcal in Garmin! There must have been something wrong about it. Continue reading
A few days ago I found a nice topic on MotionBased forum. In one of the posts someone gave a way to automatic setting laps counting by the GPS positon. I knew it is possible but checking this solution realised me that I didn’t aware of this Edge feature.
What exactly is it?
Suppose that we train some uphills and we have to ride this loop five times. Usually it happens after some repetition, we forget which lap we are riding at the moment, in such situations we can keep track on repetition number with help of lap function. Each training device has got such function. Continue reading
