0 of 1 customers found this review helpful.
I like the Edge 530, it's easy to use and mostly does what it's supposed to do... minus connectivity issues. This thing has Bluetooth, BLE (low-energy), Ant+, & Wifi. I think this is where the issues stem from, to many connection options.
I have been using the bundle (heart rate, cadence & speed sensors) for just about 2 months and I have problems with connectivity about 50% of the time I set out on a ride; mostly the heart rate monitor just staying static vs. reading an actual heart rate. I have improved this slightly with wetting the sensor pads on the strap. Yay, sort of.
During the 1st few weeks of riding after initial setup with sensors in Ant+ mode, I had all the sensors just randomly drop connection and I added them as new on-the-fly during my ride. Weird thing is they were added as bluetooth vs. ant+ randomly, no option during setup to pick any other connection type, strange. So I figure this out after digging into the sensors on the Edge and unpair/repair all the sensors again as Ant+ hoping my connectivity issues would be resolved. Unfortunately, Ant+ doesn't seem to solve the problem, as of my last ride my cadence sensor just wasn't picked up by the Edge.
So with that said, the sensors are extremely underwhelming from a connectivity standpoint. I have reached out to Garmin (with some of the best tech support I've seen in the business), and apparently I have a corrupted file. I do some techy things per instruction and I'll see how this plays out over time, I guess.
The other major issue I have is the ride uploading, post-ride. I get home, I review my ride and hit that 'Upload Ride' button, only to fail EVERY SINGLE TIME. But randomly, my ride get's uploaded after I retry the upload ride 3-5 times usually. I have tried with bluetooth only (using iOS app), Wifi only (no bluetooth), Auto-upload over wifi, Auto-upload on bluetooth only... nothing. Super ridiculous from a software perspective.
I have my Di2 paired to the unit (huge reason I wanted a cycling computer in the 1st place), and that has worked 98% of the time no issue. Sometimes the edge reads out my shift mode (S1, S2, etc) randomly 5-15 minutes after a ride (bugs are great eh).
I think the software is pretty good, however I would love to sync my activity profiles with the Garmin app so I could customize there vs. with fumbly button presses... not hard to do really (Looking at Wahoo).
Overall, I'm not super pleased with this unit... while it does work and gets the job done, the amount of time and sanity (likely safety too on the road trying to figure out why the eff my sensor dropped out or HR is stuck at 65 bpm...) is probably a reason to drive me to a competitor in the future.
Value for money here is the big one, I think in no way this unit is worth
Thank you for your feedback.