Thursday, June 12, 2008

What do you call two bike computers on one bike?

The diagnosis is in... I have acute infomania. I've always loved the Shimano Flight Deck computer, with its integration into the shift/brake levers. The control buttons are in the levers, and the computer can directly read what gear you're in. Enter the tooth count of each gear at setup, and it can even calculate "effective" cadence from the gear ratio and your speed. It's a really slick setup, and keeps me aware of my gear choice without having to look down at my gears.

However, I'm an even bigger fan of Garmin's Edge GPS computer. It doesn't need any setup at all, since it reads speed via GPS signals, so moving it from bike to bike is very, very simple and requires no recalibration. Plus, it not only tracks your speed, it tracks your position, and at the end of a ride, you can download the data to a computer, where you can view your speed, see the course on a map, see an elevation profile -- just tons of awesome information. With Garmin's Motion Based website, you can even do things like comparing several rides against each other, with a little dot representing each ride! Really, really cool stuff.

But, using only the Garmin, I find myself really missing the gear indicator of the Shimano... so I decided... why not just run both? Thankfully, the Garmin mounts to the stem, and the Flight Deck mounts in front of the stem, so they don't interfere with one another. Sure does look kinda funny, though!

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