For about a year now I have been using a Magellan Cyclo 505 and my cycling computer/GPS navigation device. It’s been a good device throughout that time but it hasn’t been without its problems.
When it was first released in the US & AU in April of 2014 (the UK already had it for a year prior) it came with software version 4.0. It worked right out of the box, paired with my Bluetooth sensors perfectly and worked as expected. Bluetooth was important to me as I already had those sensors from when I was using my iPhone. If I had gone with a Garmin I would have needed to replace those senors with ANT+ versions. Unfortunately my good fortune wasn’t experienced by everyone and there were many reports of users suffering from what was dubbed the “distance doubling bug”. What would happen is when some people paused their ride (either manually or automatically) and then resumed their ride the Cyclo would double the distance they had traveled. In some cases the error would correct itself later in the ride, other times it wouldn’t and sometimes it would propagate itself to the Magellan Cyclo website where rides are uploaded to. Thankfully services like Strava disregard many of these false stats and re-calc the rides themselves. Support tickets were created and users were assured a fix was in the works.
Fast forward to October 2014 and 4.1 was released which was to take care of the distance doubling bug. For some uses it did just that, but for others, like me, it actually introduced the bug into their rides. Of course I updated right before a 100k charity ride which got recorded as 469575.82 miles instead of the usual ~60 miles. After some testing and compiling of data from users on the CycloGPS.com forum we figured out the bug only seemed to affect certain BTLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) sensors and did not seem to affect ANT+ sensors at all. I logged a ticket and was told a fix would be out in about “2 weeks” which seems to be their standard line, which equates to about 6 months. To band-aid the problem some users just stopped using sensors, others took the magnet off their wheel and just used GPS speed or others, like me, went out and purchased ANT+ speed & cadence sensors. So what once was a selling point for me mattered no more.
That’s right folks, I got myself a Magellan… no, not that Magellan, but a
