When I saw this announced by Garmin, I knew that it was something that I’d be interested in. I’ve flip flopped between Garmin and the Apple Watch over the last two years, often coming back to my Garmin Instinct Solar (and the non solar version before that). However, the reason for going back and testing the Apple Watch was for the onboard Siri support - being able to turn lights on and off in the house with my voice is handy, as well as the occasional quick text message or receiving a phone call whilst my phone is in my bike bag.
It’s been on my wish list for a while, but I finally purchased a Varia Radar Light (Varia RTL515) recently from Amazon, as it was on offer.
However, I didn’t keep it very long and it was used for a day before returning.
Perhaps I was expecting too much of it or that my use case wasn’t the best example of it.
Radar The light uses radar to detect cars behind you and alert you to the fact on your head unit.
GPS Accuracy After a recent walk, I decided to analyse the data from the Garmin FIT files - one from my eTrex 25 and the other from my Apple Watch 4 and iPhone XR. I was purely interested in seeing how well the Garmin eTrex 25 was able to act as a tracker - mainly as when I was using it for my geocaching walk, it seemed to be tracking me, but looked on the screen to be sticking purely to the paths in the grounds of Wollaton Hall, which was a bit surprising.
Background I never used to be a watch person, though that all change when I started running when at Loughborough and then when I moved to London and was at the mercy of trains (and meetings), I found a watch to be something I couldn’t leave behind.
For years, I used a classic - the Casio F-91W.
Not only was it bombproof (though, perhaps the wrong word to use there considering that owning one of the watches in Afghanistan was apparently enough to cause the Americans to detain you for questioning as it was often the watch used for detonators!