Anyone know where a garmin edge 500 gets its temperature info from? Is it a sensor mounted on the unit or satellite data? Mine this morning as I neared the end of my ride said 105.2. Now it was hot but not that bad, thermometer when I reached home said 94. Makes me think the unit must have a temp sensor and it was affected by being out in the sun, but friends say it comes from satellite. Anyone know for sure?

How could the GPS satellites possibly know the local temperature? It's a thermometer. An inaccurate one.

Temp sensor is on the device, and I find mine to always be 5 to 6 degrees high, consistently.

temps on the road are usually hotter.

blacktop is hot.

thermistor is built into the unit. it's slow to respond to big temp changes and i suspect it may read high when the sun beats on it.

Mine is dead on accurate when in the out of the sun. I even tried to cover the top of it with foil-bubble wrap to see if it would make a difference. It does buy not as much as you may think. There is a lot of heat coming off that road. I makes a person think a little more about proper hydration doesn't it.

Temp sensors that need to be accurate have special (and bulky) shielding, required to get consistent readings. Cycle computers, like cheap weather stations, lack any shielding. The sensor is simply enclosed in the same plastic as everything else, and when exposed to sunlight can easily read 10+ degrees higher than the actual temperature.

Mine also seems to run high, as much as 10 deg F...... especially when exposed to direct sunlight.

Totally love the unit though. I don't care that much about the temp reading and even thought about disabling it from the display. When riding this time of year I'm either hot, really hot, or really-really F'ing hot so whatever number is on the display is completely irrelevant to me.

You also have to consider that if you stop, or even when pedaling, the sun is shining down on the Edge, and so if you stop, the prolonged exposure = heat = higher than normal temp.

I use my cell phone for current temperatures, the one one function of the Edge 500 I don't use. BeWeather is a great Blackberry app.

I found mine so inaccurate that I simply removed it from the fields I display. Now it doesn't bother me anymore!

Charles

Really, it displays temp? Who knew?

if it reads 5* higher than the air temp because it is out in the sun....and you are also out in the sun... Isn't that the temp you want to know anyway?

I would rather know the temp i am feeling as opposed to what a "heavily shielded weather station" might feel.

You should swallow the GPS so it reads you core temp.

Really? Your skin is the same as a small piece of plastic?

The temp that builds up inside a plastic box has no relation to "What you're feeling". If it did than parked cars would never get hot.

A few months ago I went out a hike on a beautiful day. Cool and dry - low 70s. When I got back I glanced at the temp reading from a cheap weather station - the sensor box was in the sun, and it seemed to think it was in the 90s. That wasn't because it felt like 90 degree temps, that was because an enclosed space acts like an oven in the sun.

I want garmin to put out a new HRM strap that also measures your body temperature. It would be interesting to see how overheated I get out there...of course overlaid with all the other telemetry info garmin floods me with.

You couldn't accurately measure core temp with a skin sensor, especially when you are hot and sweaty. You would have to swallow a pill which measured your core temp(a la lance armstrong) or perhaps attach a probe to your saddle if you know what i mean.

Maybe garmin should produce a body core temp sensor to help identify heat stroke, they could build it into the saddle maybe

of course to be super accurate they would have to use a probe or pill....but I'm sure that with a decent cross section of testing athletes under various conditions, ages, temperature ranges.....decently accurate algorithms could be made so that a device could take your skin temperature and "translate" it into a a fairly accurate "Core Temperature" reading.

Get on this Garmin

AFAIK, GPS satellites only transmit time data; the GPS unit uses the time info and its data on the satellites' orbital positions to triangulate your location on the surface.

The real question is why doesn't the 705 have this feature.. (even if it's a little off)