Last night I did a road ride in unfamiliar territory using the Cue Sheet app. Only a route about 14 miles long but in an area I had never ridden before. My gut told me there would likely be some hills and as usually the gut was on the money. After mapping the ride on "ridewithgps" I noticed on the bottom of the route page that there is graph that shows the elevation of the ride. I did glance at it but having never used one before I really didn't know how to interpret the information. All I knew was that the route showed lots of hills.
I got through the first half of the ride without too much problem. Only one hill I would rate, "butt kicking" so I was feeling good and the Cue Sheet app was working without any problems. Then I got on a road that was either going down a really steep fast hill or going up a really steep hill. I have no problems on hills usually but three of the climbs were quite long and quite steep. On two I had to eventually stop to rest because I was getting too beat. Been quite a while since I got my butt kicked like that. Next time I'll take the elevation graph more seriously.
Cue sheet app worked like a pro. It did lose the signal at one point but that was on one of the killer climbs that just so happened to be going under some high tension wires. I could hear the wires crackling as I rode under. When I got out of range of the wires the app caught up and all was good.
A few other issues came up during the ride having to do with using the Android as a GPS.. First was the mounting. I need a better mount set-up. Currently I use the "Bikase" case. Using this case I can't hear the prompts because the zipper case incloses my phone. Not a big problem if there is no traffic or I'm poking along but at speed with traffic around it is hard to hear the prompts. Second is just a night issue, the screen is quite bright ( when on ) it hurts your night vision. Not a big problem and I might be able to change that on future night rides. If there is one issue with the app I wish I could change it would be that I wish when the unit starts to give verbal prompts that it would automatically turn the screen on, that would be nice.
The ride took about 1.5hr. Only used about 40% of my battery. Recorded distance was right on the money. Laughingly, my average speed only came out to just over 9mph. Made no difference that I flew down the hills near 35mph, the climbs were absolute death marches.
