Garmin cadence sensors

Worth buying or not?

Given an Edge 500 for Christmas and wondered whether the cadence thingy was worth the extra. At £20 I would have been tempted, but at £40+ I’m not so sure…

… especially as mounted on one bike would eventually mean – more required for the other bikes…

I have an Edge 305 and have a cadence sensor on my road bike, where it’s really useful for road-training type rides or if I put the bike on the turbo. Worth the money IMHO.

I also use the Edge as a computer, tracker and between-getting-the-map-out navigation aid on my mountain bikes, and don’t notice the lack of cadence info there. Since you can customise the displays, there’s not even an empty box.

It does give you a more accurate distance as well as cadence!

Its only £30 on Handtec and you can get it cheaper elsewhere – try ebay!

It does give you a more accurate distance as well as cadence!

Does it also use the wheel distance to compute speed? One of my previous reservation on GPS computers was whether the GPS based speed sensor was accurate enough

Yes it will auto find the circumference but you can add it in manually. Its is fairly accurate on GPS but prob not over longer distances?

I think the GPS is more accurate than a wheel sensor, unless you are having particularly bad reception problems, which I certainly don’t get.

think the GPS is more accurate than a wheel sensor, unless you are having particularly bad reception problems, which I certainly don’t get.

I can believe that for a road bike – where the pace is steady and the course is smooth and straight.

Find it harder to accept for a mtb on singletrack. I suspect that we change direction and speed far more frequently than the GPS accuracy can accomodate

ETA – added to which all this twisty , turny, uppy, downy, slowed down by rocks, accelerate down chutes stuff often happens under, or in and out of, tree cover…

Worth it on the road bike, but not offroad unless your doing big epic rides over really flat terriain, in which case why arent you on the road bike?

Shop arround though, I paid £23 or so, still a lot when you considder how little a cateye strada is.

I spent an hour on the turbo and my Garmin tried to tell me I hadn’t been anywhere so I thought sod it and went to the velodrome, can you guess what happened?

Try buying a replacement cadence magnet, IIRC about £9!!

The 500 is ANT+ I think so any ANT+ cadence sensor should work. You could attach with reusable zip ties or buy normal ones in bulk and it wouldn’t work out much in pence to keep swopping over. Also I use a non biking round magnet attached to the pedal spindle for cadence – stays put and better than those stuck to the crank.