Tacx Neo 2T Smart Trainer

If you have a public TR account setting, sharing a related workout could be helpful. Short of that, some pictures of the zoomed in intervals of interest is the next best.

Outside of that, it may be worth an email to support@trainerroad.com so they can dig into the hidden stuff we can’t access for review.

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These intervals are 15, 40, 70, 75 seconds.
Screenshot 2022-02-04 16.12.01

The ramp in is far too long. I’m not sure it’s a TR issue, likely a Neo 2T issue. Given my previous two Neo’s have been super responsive with TR.

The lag is much much greater than my previous two Neo’s they would take less than 3 seconds to ‘lock in.’

I will give power match a try.

I don’t have one but I’m interested in the neo 2t, so I looked at the other posts about it.
Are you using big gears? Some users reported that the oscillation problem could be solved by using smaller gear. I would also expect the lag to be smaller with small gear.

I use 34T and middle of the cassette, the lag is more if I use the big ring but both are still much more than my previous Neo’s.

The 2T is crazy fast with changes. This might be the one you got specifically or something else is going on. Here’s a 30/30 with powermatch on. The power spikes are at most 5 seconds into the interval. Most around 3-4s.

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Possible cause… you’re ramping your cadence at the same time. I’ve noticed that if I anticipate the power change too much and spin up my cadence, it takes much longer for the Neo to bring up resistance. Power is a function of cadence, so spinning up right at the start of an interval messes up the trainer’s ability to accurately gauge what power you’re putting down, so it takes longer. Try keeping you cadence steady through the interval start, and ramp up cadence after the resistance “hits”.

You can see it in your cadence graph line. Especially that first interval.

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It’s just not the same as my previous Neo’s, even with great cadence control going into the effort, the lag would be too great to ever be able to do 30/30’s, even 60’s would take too long to lock in. I had no trouble with 15/15’s on my previous Neo.

This is what 24s @ 460W look like on my 2T setup, when the countdown of the previous section reaches 00:02s you “hit the wall”, so right before the interval. However, in the corresponding power track, the target wattage is reached 2s into the interval, never later than 3s in my experience. This workout was done using the desktop app (power smoothing set to 3s) connected via ANTplus-Dongle to the NEO 2T.

As your can see, I change my cadence right before and then ease into the interval.

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Iid 30/30s recently on neo 2t. Every interval look like this. Start:
image

End:
image

Bt connection for hr en neo with old ipad

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In my understanding, “green” represents the signal sent to the trainer, “blue” is the planned workout, and “yellow” what’s actually measured. This is why “green” precedes “blue”, it’s meant to bring “blue” and “yellow” closer to each other. Obviously, “green” is what you feel during the workout, you are “hitting the wall” right before the “blue” interval. But in the end, you’d want to compare “blue” and “yellow”, planned vs executed, so you even only have 2s in the beginning of your 30s/30s.

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All correct and well stated.

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Is it better to use Ant or Bluetooth for training? I have just got myself a Tacx neo.

Either is fine, just depends on what you’re connecting to… Laptop will take BT unless you have an ANT USB stick. Apple TV only takes BT. Most phones/tablets will take only BT.

I’ve just got a laptop for now. I can’t seem to find ant in the devices so I’ve been using Bluetooth so far. I just wondered what the difference was.

Either is fine but make sure you are not using both at the same time – I had mistakenly paired my tacx trainer to both ant and bluetooth and observed some pretty weird and erratic behavior (like inability to match the prescribed interval wattage at the beginning of an interval no matter how hard I pushed the pedals). I was really starting to think that something might be wrong with my trainer till I noticed that I have no such problems when loading the workout on the phone app – then found the culprit! Using only bluetooth now.

Should the yellow line be smoother, less peaky, than that?

I finally gave in and bought a Neo 2T,
Do I set up the trainer as a power meter on my garmin 530 or as a smart trainer when dual recording while on TrainerRoad?

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There are two “types” of connection (when looking in their online manual): 1) one-way (the connected device only listens to the trainer, or, as you call it, connected as power meter) 2) two-way (the connected device listens and tells the trainer what to do next, it is connected as smart trainer). Moreover, you have two protocols/channels/means of connection ANT+ and Bluetooth LE. What you are trying to do is a so-called dual connection, when more than one device/head unit is connected to the trainer one-way or two-way. While ANT+ one-way channels allow for multiple connections/devices, ANT+ two-way channels and BLE one-way and two-way channels are exclusive (at least in the version used by NEO 2T). You could in theory establish 2 two-way connections to the NEO 2T by using both ANT+ and BLE, but that would achieve nothing, right?

TLDR: Connect the NEO 2T to your TrainerRoad device as smart trainer using either BLE or ANT+, and connect your Garmin 530 head unit as a power meter (ANT+ works best for me, I have the same setup as you), you’ll get all the Garmin metrics you need.

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