Just Mark

I just acquired a Garmin Edge 830. I have 2 road bikes each at a different location. the 830 came with the sensor package (speed cadence, and HRM). I have set up the Garmin for one bike and will set it up tonight for the second bike with a second set of speed and cadence sensors. I will share the HRM between the 2 bikes. I cannot seem to figure out or find online a way to set this up so I can track by each bike separately with a single head unit. It looks to me like there can be only one "Road" profile. Any help would be grateful.

Steve B.

You can create different “Activity Profiles” on the device, which will allow you to customize screens and maps particular to each bike. You can rename each profile with the name for each bike, but track mileage per profile cannot be done, as far as I can remember. Note that the completed routes that are saved and sent to Connect do not pass along which Activity Profile was in use for a ride.

What most folks do is use either Garmin Connect, RideWithGPS or Strava as a data dump and online activity tracker. Connect and RWGPS have the ability to enter a particular bike on a recorded ride.

Just Mark

Thanks Steve B. I guess I'll take a look at Strava and RideWithGPS.

Seattle Forrest

In Garmin Connect, add both bikes as gear.

gecho

You don't have to setup separate profiles to use sensors like on the old Garmin units. Just add all your sensors and the Garmin will connect to whatever ones are active. If you go into the Sensors section of Settings you can rename the individual sensors. I've named mine: HR, Defy_CAD, Defy_SPD, ...

For my type of riding I just have one main activity profile. I have a bunch of custom map overlays, so I setup a second profile with those disabled which gives me a quick way to turn them on and off without digging through menus.

As for profiles you can delete any of the built-in ones you don't want to use. You can also copy a profile when making a new one, so if you have the road profile set up to your liking, you can make a copy of it if you really want a second one.

Just Mark

Thanks Seattle Forrest and gecho. I came here to post that I figured out pretty much what gecho said. It is also easy to switch between profiles. What I haven't figured out yet is how to attach certain bikes to certain profiles, though it doesn't much matter as each profile is named for the bike. What would be really cool is if the 830 would just choose the profile based on what sensors connected to it.

Steve B.

If you move sensors around, you then have to modify the profile. Garmin's method makes the sensors bike agnostic. They work with whatever they detect as active. Easy enough to push a button on screen to change a profile IME and you can start a ride then switch profiles, it doesn’t affect the recording of the ride. And if I recall, when you start a navigation, it asks which profile you are using and switches to that, so if you’ve a mt. bike profile, the navigation uses a Topo map if that’s what you setup in the mt. bike profile.