Kickr control issues

The Vector pedals I have are only ANT+ so thats why I don’t use Bluetooth as I do believe that’s more reliable.

Just my experience that I bought a BLE dongle and apparently there are multiple BLE specs. The dongle I bought wasn’t the exact spec that TR uses so they didn’t recognize it. My android has Bluetooth, but not BLE, but maybe it is a bit older.

And yes, you are right you can broadcast both ANT+ and Bluetooth on many devices, but if you don’t solve the ANT+ signal issue, then the ANT+ might not be reliable for anything. It may not be an issue depending on his use case, but if he wanted to use TR on his phone and Zwift on his PC, he’d need to sort out his ANT+ issue (assuming he has one.)

I can run ANT+ on both MacBook and iPhone 7, and from first hand experience can verify it has more dropouts due to interference. Bluetooth is more reliable, and I purposely looked for simultaneous ANT+/BLE support before investing in trainer and PM. I’m no longer using Zwift, but have option to do so.

Have you tried with the Kickr as the power source I.e disable your power meter and power match? If things work OK, then the Kickr is likely not the issue, and it’s more likely that the issue is the powermeter/powermatch.

Very reluctant to do that, because the power measurement accuracy/reliability of the original gen 1 Kickr has a really bad reputation.

I think I’ll dig into the ANT+ operation a little more, and see if I can spot the cause of the problem. In a previous life I did a lot of development work involving ANT+ and still have access to some of the debug tools. I can run a monitor of the ANT+ messages separately from my TR setup, and when I see a TR/Kickr problem I can go back and examine the logs. I’ll post back here if I find anything (could take me a while to organise the test).

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I could setup an analyzer too, but what are you going to do with the data? Unless it’s for personal reasons, I don’t see the payback on time investment.

File a support ticket and ask TR to check for dropouts. They did it for me and even provided some technical details when I explained my engineering background and politely asked.

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A word on ANT+ versus BLE: They use the same radio frequencies (2.4GHz band) and in almost all devices they share the same radio chip and antenna. If both are supported in a device then the ANT+ and BLE radio channels happily work at the same time for sending and receiving. However, any given app on a phone or computer might ignore one or other of them so it depends on the app. TR can use both at the same time if they are available, so for example it could use ANT+ to receive heart rate and power, and use BLE to control the smart trainer.

As for the reliability difference reported between ANT+ and BLE, there are two things I can think of that might cause that even though they use the same radio. One is that I think BLE uses a higher radio transmit power than ANT+ (which also makes ANT+ more energy efficient and therefore potentially longer battery life in sensors). The second is that ANT+ is broadcast, with no acknowledge or resend, so that many receivers can pick up 1 sensor. BLE is device-to-device, which supports resending of missed data and therefore more reliable connections. So it could very well be that BLE provides more reliable control of a smart trainer.

Curiosity! :wink:

yeah, wish I had more time. I’ve got the tools, but not the time.

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You could just do this as a temporary diagnostic step, vs. doing permanently

The most basic and important difference is that BLE uses frequency hopping. Frequency hopping was designed to counteract interference.