garagedog said:
Hi garagedog,
Well I finally got to try out my Specialised Turbo Pro this morning.
Basics first, it's easy to set up, including the optional cadence sensor. The display uses big, clear characters. It's also easy to scroll through the various displays, even with gloves on.
The bread and butter stuff like the speed, cadence, tripmeter, trip time and various average and max functions all worked fine.
So to the alitimeter. It works on barometric pressure, so you have to allow a certain margin for variance as weather conditions change (in Ireland the weather changes every 20 mins
). Also, I wasn't expecting 100% accuracy given that it's not a specialist alitmeter.
When I left home I reset the alititude to 54 meters. When I got back 2 and a bit hours later after 55km's my house was at 52 meters (sudsidence?
), but I think that's acceptable.
The highest point of my spin was listed as 254 meters on the computer and I've checked on the map and that hill is listed there as 255 meters. So that's pretty good I think.
The only bad point would seem to be the inclinometer. I only used it on that one hill and it would appear as 4%, then 0%, then 6%, then 0% then 10% then 8%....all in the space of a couple of hundred meters on a pretty steady climb (put it this way, I was in the same gear all doing the same cadence most of the way up). I know that it computes the gradient by distance travelled and change in altitude every 4 seconds, so a certain delay in reflecting changes in gradient is to be expected, but I still found this very disappointing. The inclinometer was one of the things that swung me towards buying this over some other cheaper models. So, I'm going to mail Specialized to ask them to explain it. I'll post any feedback I get on here.
A couple of other things that I liked were the alititude gain function and the temperature function. Was nice to know that I climbed just under 400m in what I always considered a 'flat' route and it made me feel very virtuous having set off in a crisp 2 degrees celsius.
All the best,
Tonto.