Favorite discontinued cycling product

[Mark McM]

Originally Posted by MikeD

How good was/is the altitude gain function? I haven't seen a bike computer, including the GPS enabled ones, come close to the Avocet 50's accuracy for this. I still have two (I believe) functional Avocet 50s but the mounts/wiring failed and I switched to Garmin Edge computers.

How did you determine that the Avocet 50 is accurate? Determining altitude gain is not as easy as it sounds due to the "coastline paradox" (this has been discussed in previous threads).

In particular, the Avocet 50's hysteresis function was crude, and can cause many changes in altitude to be ignored. Specifically, the Avocet 50 will not accumulate any altitude gain of less than 30 feet. As an extreme example, if you rode a route that was a like a sawtooth with a sequence of many hills that were 25 feet tall, each with a grade of 20% grade, the Avocet would not accumulate any climbing at all. The Avocet 50 was probably fine if all climbs on the route were large, but it may not work as well on routes with many small undulations.