Originally Posted by
futuregrace
I found this Garmin Edge 500 on ebay, anyone ever used it?
Yup, I bought one for $180 new-in-box.
Does it work well?
Good:
The 2.4 GHZ ANT+ heart rate and speed/cadence sensors don't glitch like older wireless setups.
It'll record about 20 hours of data sampling at 1-second intervals.
It appears as a USB storage device for download purposes so you don't need any special hardware or software.
The GPS co-ordinates make it trivial to correlate power and heart rate data with specific events so you don't need to find that big hill by scanning through your ride data looking for somewhere with high heart rate and low speed.
It'll display up to 8 things (5 is less busy with a big top line - I have speed, 3 second power, distance, heart rate, and cadence) on one screen and you can scroll between 3 or 4 (following a downloaded workout).
The back-light can be set to stay on so it works well for evening rides.
It's water resistant.
The mount is secure.
Bad:
You can't display information from the last lap until you save the activity.
It will only record at 1 second intervals when you have a power meter. Otherwise it uses "smart recording" that allegedly introduces artifacts to the data.
Indifferent:
You can't get time in heart rate or power zones off the computer. This doesn't matter because if you care you should be analyzing your rides in software which will do the same thing.
The calorie calculation using heart rate is a lot closer to reality than other bike computers.
It gets 18 hours out of each battery charge. I'm unlikely to ride that long without having access to a computer's USB port.
There's no navigation (you can program routes though) but lots of us don't ride places where no one on the ride knows where we are.