Powertap 2.4 Experience

Well, I took a chance on the new PT 2.4 and so far the experience has been less than 100% positive. My first ride with the unit was this past Saturday and over the course of 3.5 hours, I experienced 24 signal drops of 5-15 seconds per each. After speaking with Saris on Monday, I tried new batteries in the CPU and hub, but all that did was increase my investment by $16.

My 2.4 is now on the way back to Saris and I'm giving them one chance to fix the problem. While the issues could be worse, I want and expect a 100% functional and reliable unit for the investment that I have made.

I'll post a follow up once I get the unit back from Saris. Their customer service staff has been great to deal with; I hope the Saris tech staff follows suit.

Investment? You speak as if the PT 2.4 is the most expensive, no compromise powermeter on the market.

How much did you pay in all for the unit? I got a brand new Ergomo Pro from ebay at $1240 shipped. Works fine but there is a bug in the speed and total distance measurements.

well my new wireless powertap has been mostly fine but lately I've been getting periods of data dropped -also, my last ride is downloading a different ride time each time even though the PT itself has correct #s-I put mine on a zipp 303 wheel and maybe its not the most expensive I use it for everything and its still cost 1600.00 or so-so yeah I want the damn thing to work properly;did saris give you a turn-around time estimate?

That's still less than half the price of an SRM. PTs are still considered budget powermeters. You're trading something for the low cost.

I am using the PT 2.4 now for 5 training sessions. In 4 sessions I had about 7 drop outs per hour of the power unit. The computer was searching between 1-10 seconds to get the connection with the power unit again. In one session of 5 hours duration I had only 2 very short drop outs. I could live with such very occasional short drop outs. The heart rate never failed. The sessions were under rather cold conditions of 0-10°C. I have the impression that the PT 2.4 definetelly doesn't like the cold, the same as I do . It should become warmer this weekend, hopefully the PT 2.4 work better then.

Irrespective of the price of the PT compared to an SRM, your PT should work properly, and the issues here sound like too many drops. I'm sure Saris will take care of the people. I've had about a fortnight on mine and it's been fine - not one dropout (compared to my wired SL which would have one or two drops per week). the only 'issue' is that it can take maybe 30-secs to find the hub when i start a ride, this is vaguely annoying as i keep forgetting this and keep losing the first 30-secs data of each ride.

Ric

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http://www.cyclecoach.com

Purposely being a jerk is something you should have grown out of.

Ric,

You've nailed it; even if I had only spent $200 on the PT, I would expect it to function properly. I could settle for one, maybe two drops per hour but one every 10 minutes is unacceptable.

In my original post I failed to mention that while attempting to troubleshoot the drop problem, I rode on the trainer with the CPU in a number of different positions including on floor, beneath the BB. In this position, I didn't experience any drops. I did pass this info along to Saris and they seemed to feel that this indicates insufficient signal strength from the sending unit.

Saris has promised a one week turnaround so we'll find out soon enough if they have the fix for the constant drops.

Just a thought.

Diid you try re- Learning the hub and HR strap again.

One every 10-mins is way bad. I believe that some of the earliest 2.4's had some dropout/signal problems, but that this has now been cured. I've sold a few 2.4s now and they're all been fine

ric

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http://www.cyclecoach.com

My initial 2.4 had some dropout problems. After returning the hub to Saris, I have not had a dropout. Apparently, the signal from the hub was too weak. New procedures put into place before shipping are supposed to have fixed the problem.

I have also been having dropout problems with my new 2.4, which I got 2 weeks ago. Their tech support people have been very nice, but it is frustrating to spend that much money and have to go through this.

They had me "relearn" the hub, which on the surface didn't make sense, since the CPU was receiving the signal 95% of the time already. Next I'm supposed to swap out the hub batteries, but again, I'm not sure it would be working this much if the batteries were shot. I'm willing to do anything they suggest, but it just seems I could have saved some time and the money for new batteries by just sending it back to begin with. The guy who mentioned the underpowered transmitter seems to make the most sense.

Underpowered transmitter, insensitive receiver or excessive interference environment are all possibilites. I design wireless equipment and any part of the link including signal processing sw bugs could be the culprit. Make sure you send them both the transmitter and CPU unit if it goes back since the problem could be in either end of the link.

Some folks have noticed a correlation between wearing the HR strap and excessive dropouts with their PT SL 2.4s. Have you tried running with and without the strap? Now that they've gone to a coded HR strap there has to be a code synchronization search. Seems to me they may be dropping back into a synch acquisition state everytime they lose HR forcing both the HR receiver and hub receiver to resynch. Just speculation based on bugs I've seen in other spread spectrum products, but if you haven't done so, you might try riding with and without the HR strap.

Good luck
-Dave

Great post, thanks. Interference should not be an issue as I ride almost exclusively in a rural area. I have not tried dropping the HR strap, as it has been consistently working and so at least I have that data to work with. But given the choice between HR and hub data, that's a no brainer... I'll give that a shot as well.