sarals 

I totally agree on the blue over the green. Matching Magic Bike would be really nice! Gulf racing colors on Sparrow? Hmmm. You're right, you'd need the saddle to match. It would look really good!

IBOHUNT

@revchuck - I haven't been around much but I do add you to the list every night. When I do get a chance to ride and it gets flat I wonder how you are doing. You've had a tough year.

shovelhd

Mine is about to take a trip in the wrong direction. Temporarily.

revchuck 

Oh, so you gotta rub it in about how there are no hills down here, huh? Thanks, buddy! I'm from up around Altoona (of Tour de 'Tuna fame) and get a little homesick every time I check out your rides on Strava. You're not that far from there.

I have a hard time feeling bad about my situation...well, the copay for my last procedure would've paid for that Powertap crank-based PM, so that's a bummer, but otherwise? Nah. I have cancer, but it's one of the most treatable kinds with one of the highest success rates, and my treatment is non-invasive and won't screw with my riding. For more context, my father died at 56 from heart disease, and my mother died at 54 from colon cancer. I'm the youngest of three boys at 63 years old, and my two older brothers are doing well too. I catch a cold every couple of years whether I need to or not. At my last physical, my doctor (35 years old) told me he wished his numbers from blood work were that good. My biggest complaint is getting crushed at bike races. I'm way ahead of most guys my age. I ain't gonna fuss. Life is good.

Heathpack 

Nice perspective, @revchuck.

globecanvas

Jeez, I can't even sleep until 8 on weekends. "Sleeping in" means 6:30 at best.

Re the bonk, I took 2 days fully off the bike, then an easy day, and was fine doing intensity on day 4. I'm glad I took it easy because honestly Inwas still feeling queasy and sort of jet-laggy even on day B+2.

Racer Ex 

If you haven't read it, Paul Fournel has a great section in "Need For the Bike" discussing "meeting the man with the hammer".

Fun book.

Heathpack 

I was supposed to go today and scout a TT course for a TT I'll be riding in September. There's some nice mountains nearby, so I organized a climbing thing for after the TT scout, the plan was to start in the Cajon Pass. Which conveniently caught on fire yesterday afternoon and still was aflame this morning, so there went that plan.

So I drummed up some people for a local climbing ride instead, threw in my assigned intervals and then a 30 min TT segment up one of the climbs. Two short climbs after that and I managed all three of them with a VI of 1. I'm working on smooth.

Halfway down the first descent, I stopped to take a picture of the dramatic dark clouds off in the distance and then we proceeded to ride in that very direction. We got rained on, a first just a little, then eventually a lot. It was actually pretty nice, you don't get much of that in California.

Mile 1000 today on my poor neglected spare bike, which is a Trek Madone aka The Sparrow. I've had it a year and hardly ever ride it, because the main bike has Di2 (which I really prefer) and better wheels. But I just put Di2 on the Sparrow and I'm getting some new wheels for it, as soon as I stop dithering and make a decision. Its a pretty sweet little bike, I had a lot of fun on it today. 45 miles/4000 feet climbing, IF 0.8, TSS 278.






Oh yeah and BTW, I just checked with the shop and the new TT bike will be ready to be picked up this afternoon.

shovelhd

Wow nice ride Heathpack.

I had a great day officiating the race I'm on the RC for today. I am going to request that I be the RD next year. We shall see. Tomorrow I am going to go on a nice two hour ride with some of the volunteers.

Racer Ex 

Racer Ex 

And, now that you are in the club, two videos you should watch:

Full Gas

And you'll need to work on your bunny hopping:

sarals 

Just the best!

sarals 

Ex, that is CLASSIC Must See TT! One of my favorites. "Motor" and all!

sarals 

Coach had me do a strength workout Thursday, two sets of each exercise. I did them according to plan, and just nailed them. I was a little sore yesterday, which was fine, because it was a rest day. Today's workout ride featured a twenty minute TT effort over FTP, and now I'm a LOT sore. But, the training ride went "according to plan". Sore is good.

IBOHUNT

No hills but you do have gators to hunt so you got that going for you.
Great outlook, I really hope that this chapter goes well and is over quickly.

Hermes

I rolled around today about 1.5 hours of low tempo. Beautiful day with lots of cyclists out.

Heathpack 

Max power on today's workout 3852 watts. I am getting so strong.

(Not really. The Stages PM is a POS.) (Sorry if I have offended anybody. Make that: IME the Stages PM is a POS.)

Lost the power meter any time I would stand or otherwise push hard on the pedals. So no intervals, although I did ride my bike around for awhile being annoyed by the power meter.

revchuck 

End of recovery week. TSS for the week is 203, 2828 kj, 95 miles. First VO2 max intervals tomorrow.

sarals 

Recovery ride this morning while watching a rare California summer thunderstorm. Not under it, near it! It made for an exhilarating ride and beautiful sunrise.

IBOHUNT

Aside from the battery cover doors breaking the little tabs I've never had a problem with mine. Registers a bit higher than the numbers the compu-trainer says but they were consistently high week to week last winter.

Heathpack 

I know that people do have these ok experiences with Stages. Over a six month period of time, I had an 80% failure rate on rides over 100 miles. I'm not talking about brief data dropouts, I'm talking about the failure to collect power and cadence data for hours and hours of the ride. Or locking on a specific power number while continuing to record other data just fine. Or really loopy things that you would not think relate to the power meter, like failing to record HR data or giving me erroneous speed readings. Believe me, I was 100% convinced that all of this was a Garmin problem, I worked with Garmin for months on it and had the same issues on 4 different Garmin units. Garmin kept saying it was the Stages, I thought they were passing the buck. The Garmin explanation was that sending bad/weak data to the Garmin head units would fatally confuse them.

I also worked with Stages, was seeing the same problems on both PMs. I sent one back and they tested it and said it was fine but still replaced all the internal electronics, which did not help. I've probably been through a half dozen set of battery doors, although I've only have the tabs break once on one unit. stages just kept sending me upgraded doors anyway.

Then when I got the SRM about 6 weeks ago, every problem stopped. The Garmin head unit works perfectly and so does the SRM. Well, I'll be a money's uncle, it *was* the Stages all along.

I have no idea why I have so much more trouble than other people. The only thing I can imagine is because I do some very long rides, I was training for a series of tough climbing centuries and maybe did something like 15ish 100-200 mile rides from Nov 2014 to May 2015. The end of May is when I finally gave up and got the SRM. I do have issues with the Stages on shorter rides, but my impression is that the Stages is particularly ill-suited to endurance riding, the ANT+ signals it puts out are too weak to supply the Garmin with good data for 5+ hours continuously. Who knows though? I am nothing but happy for people who have good luck with the Stages, but that has 100% not been my experience. Although they are nice people at Stages, I'll give then that.

sarals 

Heathie, I'm remembering the conversation in the restaurant we had about your Stages after the Kings Mountain/Tunitas ride we did with Racer Ex and Heidi. I don't know if I mentioned that my PowerTap hub would suddenly drop out when the battery started to weaken. It would behave exactly as your Stages does. Suddenly the calibration would go wonky and my Garmin 800 wouldn't record power data from it any longer, even though it would see the hub. PowerTap did a firmware upgrade which solved that battery issue. Anyway, the Garmins apparently have a narrow reception margin for ANT+ signals. IMHO, once the power level of the signal drops below a certain value, they just "give up" on the device that is sending the data, even though they still see that device. I think you're on to something vis a vie the length of your rides. The battery voltage drops a bit in the Stages, the ANT+ transmitted signal losses strength, and the Garmin doesn't see that ANT+ signal any longer.

Hermes

How fun throwing Stages under the bus plus they deserve it. Heathpack may ride in areas that have more 2.4 Ghz interference than others.

With other forms of RF transmission, the transmitter broadcasts and it is up to the receiver and selectivity around the transmitted frequency to filter out interference. ANT+ looks to opportunity to transmit when there is no interference.

As with any system, there are tricks of the trade that make circuits work. SRM designs an entire system so maybe they have more selectivity and greater sensitivity in the their PC7 thus offering more opportunity to have successful transmission.

How well does ANT handle interoperability with other 2.4GHz radios?
ANT, ZigBee, Bluetooth, 802.11 and some cordless phones all use the 2.4 GHz band as well as 868- and 915 MHz in regional deployments. Additionally household microwaves and other consumer products share this croweded frequency band.


802.11, ZigBee and Bluetooth employ Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum (DSSS) and Frequency- Hopping Spread Spectrum (FHSS) schemes respectively to maintain the integrity of the wireless link. ANT+ uses an adaptive isochronous network technology to ensure co-existence. Adaptive isochronous network technology provides the ability for each transmission to occur in an interference-free time slot within the defined frequency band. The radio transmits for less than 150 μs per message, allowing a single channel to be divided into hundreds of timeslots.

The ANT messaging period (the time between each node transmitting its data) determines how many time slots are available. ANT's adaptive isochronous scheme doesn't require a master clock. Transmitters start broadcasting at regular intervals but then modify the transmission timing if interference from a neighbor is detected on a particular timeslot. This flexibility allows ANT to adapt to hostile conditions but ensures there is no overhead when interference is not present. The absence of a system clock simplifies the sensor node hardware design and avoids clock skew/sync issues.


If the radio environment is very crowded, ANT can use frequency agility to allow an application microcontroller-controlled "hop" to an alternative 1 MHz channel in the 2.4 GHz band which can then be subdivided into timeslots.

Heathpack 

Haha, I did not follow most of that.

Someone (I can't remember who) explained it to me that the environment the ANT+ signals are operating in are very "noisy". The Stages sends out a weak ANT+ signal whereas the SRM sends out a strong signal. Its like the Stages is whispering in a noisy environment and the head units have trouble hearing what the Stages is saying. The SRM, on the other hand, is shouting loud and clear- despite the background noise, the SRM can more reliably be heard.

It turns out I didn't really need to get the PC7, now that I have the SRM, the Garmin works fine. So the SRM might communicate better with the PC7 but so far my experience is that it communicates just fine with the Garmin too.

If I'm in an unusually noisy environment, that would include a large swath of SoCal, because these rides were all over the place- in populated areas as well as desolate places. I've lost the Stages in the middle of nowhere in the Los Padres National Forest and in mega traffic down in the OC. I'm an equal-opportunity data dropper, it seems.

shovelhd

I have an SRM and a Stages, feeding a Garmin 800. i have had data drops multiple times on each meter.