Did you happen to have a front light connected as well? When I added a Bontrager front light to my Garmin 1030, I started getting all kinds of disconnect error with my Varia rear radar and even my power meter. I ended up taking the Bontrager light off the Garmin and all the issues went away.
I’m thinking of either a 530 or 830 for my mountain bike and keeping the 1030 for road use only.
How many people are recording their indoor TR rides on a Garmin to get the Garmin metrics and, if so, are you finding it helpful? Right now I record to iPad and then just sync to my different ecosystems (Garmin, Strava, TrainingPeaks), but that doesn’t get me the Garmin Firstbeat metrics.
My plan is also to use the 530 on my MTB and the 1030 on my road bike. To answer Kuttermax’s question- I never use my Garmin to record indoor TR rides. If I do I end up getting duplicate rides in Strava and TR and TrainingPeaks that I then have to delete. Also, it is just another thing to keep charged up. I don’t care that much about FirstBeat metrics but I do sync TR rides to Garmin Connect and I was told that GC uses that for calculating FirstBeat stuff as well as rides that are directly recorded. I don’t know if that is really true or not but I primarily look at TR and TP metrics anyway.
I’m most interested in having the ability to create a race warmup to follow on the fly or a small selection saved on the device at least. I’m having a hard time getting workouts I made to my Bolt since my PC won’t show the Bolt for some reason. At least I thought it was possible to push some not in a plan via USB connection. I am able to push workouts over WiFi via TrainingPeaks so I suppose I could plan 5 workouts on the race day and just pick one.
Hi handynzl,
I’ve found auto-pause on the Elemnt Bolt to be quite sensitive, so that could be why auto-pause is occurring on switchbacks.
I haven’t found any issues with GPS strength thus far having done about 3-4 rides in more dense tree cover of the dozens of rides I’ve done with both the 830 and 530. Do note though that I am using 1-second interval recording rates rather than Smart recording to achieve the best accuracy. Two days ago I was in some dense tree cover in Fort Collins (Follow Des on Strava to see this activity. Join for free.) and had zero issues. Today I’ll be heading out again into the woods for more testing for the final review that should be out in a week or two but so far GPS is looking good.
No front light connected. I have a 4iiii’s heart rate strap and a magene cadence sensor. Disconnected heart rate and it kept disconnecting and just setup a 4iiii’s precision power meter so have gotten rid of the magene. I will test it out when it stops snowing.
Since a bunch of us will likely get the 530/830 it’s that dreaded programming the screens time again.
Since we still don’t have a mobile app to make this less painful; I updated my spreadsheet for building screens based on the data in the 830 manual.
Warning that xls has macros in it (aka vba junk code). The only harm it will cause is saving you a couple hours thinking over what fields go where.
It works, it’s not robust because it doesn’t have to be; if you break it start over with a fresh copy. If you are really stuck ask and if I have time I’ll try and explain.
I haven’t seen a 530/830 so the field layout might not be completely right, those were based on a 1030
Thank you for your effort!!! I have a 1030 and actually am enjoying the touch screen. I do miss the app from the bolt… But that’s the only thing I miss lol.
Yeah I probably should have said this works with the 1030 and the 1000; someone would have to vet the 520 and the 520plus and 820 screen field layouts to see if I missed any. We have bolts here that need to find new homes, and the only thing I missed was the setup on the phone. So after dreading and avoiding spending time programming the 1030 (my 1000 took me weeks to settle and adjust); I dug this out from 4 years ago and thought hmmmmm; does this really need to be static or can I make it dynamic and usable. 4 hours later done. And that’s still faster than I could have programmed the 1030 with all that menu stress.
Just fixed a couple of typos and added 2 missing fields. if anyone is already using it you can just update the datafields tab to get the newest version without breaking any thing entered in.
Pre ordered mine as my old trusty 500 died the day before it was launched. Looks like delivery has been pushed back a couple of weeks which is annoying with a B event this weekend an A in 2 weeks don’t know if to go for the Wahoo or hold fire
It will show live “Grade” as you go but since it doesn’t know where you are going next it can’t pre-plot it; no predictive trail/road projections at this time. Probably could if not for the battery costs to compute the options and how far down stream to go; sortof a chess/math problem.
From a read of the manual. just the old grade % field and the old elevation graphic if you aren’t on a course. Will know more when the units arrive of course.
Also a little disappointing that user can not define the threshold for what a climb is. climbing is always relative to what you are use to. Climbpro could be really more useful to a lot of people even those whose climb is just 3-4 minutes long. Hopefully in the future they will make that editable.
Mine arrived on Friday and did its first proper ride on Sunday. Some initial thoughts, this is upgrading from a 500 so some of these might be usual to users of 510/520 etc. In general, it just worked the data looks very accurate from the tracking etc. routing was good and text messages came through
I did an 8 hour elapsed (7.5 moving) ride on Sunday with temperatures between 3-17c, I was following a strava route, with my Pixel 3 connected by Bluetooth, 4iii left side and Wahoo Tickr both connecting with ant+ with no battery saving mode enabled. From fully charged it used exactly 50% of the battery
ClimbPro works really well but needs more data fields on view. I had Power and Elevation but I’d like to be able to see cadence too. It also displays the average gradient on the whole climb, this would be nice if it could be changed to remaining grade or next x meters. It would be nice if the profile could be broken up by colour like a veloviwer profile, mine just showed green for the whole climb rather than colour sections like the picture from DCR, but did have two data fields below. Because it is calculating the climb from the elevation data rather than segments it meant the average gradient was often shown as much lower because false flats leading into climbs were included. For those that know the lakes/fred whitton route the Newlands Pass was shown as starting at the bottom the Honistor Pass so the 1% first mile in the valley reduced the total gradient. The other issue was every time there was a junction on a climb the unit would switch to navigation mode, not such an issue at speed but when climbing it would show this screen for ages – it needs to be estimated time before the junction rather than distance.
Incident detection – I had the bike on a workstand briefly when lifting it down I got an incident detection message on my phone. It doesn’t seem like this was sent to my emergency contract, there was no way of saying no I’m fine don’t send a message which if it’s going to get such easy false positives, I think I’d need. I need to play around with this more to see if it is working or not. Also the incident detected notification in Garmin connect on my phone can’t be dismissed.
The biggest issue I had was when my 4iii Power Meter went to sleep during stops it didn’t automatically re-pair once it had woken up again and meant going back to re-pair in the menus. This didn’t happen with my Wahoo Tickr but I guess that didn’t go to sleep itself.
Stopping at the end of the ride, I get pressing the top right button to end, I then had to open the manual to find the extra buttons at the bottom to stop it. Nutrition data is pain to be input on the unit just after finishing, would be good if all the post ride options could be done through Garmin connect when you just want to stop and sync your ride.
