Dan333SP

Fixed it for you.

Jaeger99

The Varia will tell you that the car is there before you can hear it. Unless you have truly exceptional hearing. Moving at any kind of a decent clip, I that find wind noise masks the sound of a car approaching from the rear until it's pretty damned close.

The Varia will also track multiple cars and give you a visual indication of their spacing and rate of approach. For sure your ears can't tell you that.

JohnJ80

That’s interesting. What’s kind of range do you get with that?

NoWhammies

For those of us (i.e. me) not familiar with the Varia, do you need to enable a separate screen on your Garmin to enable all this tracking?

And what model of Varia are you guys using?

WhyFi

The 510 (top) is the current model. You will be notified of a car on any data screen, Garmin or Wahoo. Check out the DCR vids for a rundown.

kissTheApex

For garmin, a kind of “WiFi” round bar looking thing stays on the top right corner of screen, which is persistent and stays there no matter what screen you’re on. When it detect traffic behind, the head unit beeps (multi tone or single tone configurable), left and right edge of the screen turns orange-to-red depending on the cars’ differential speed to you and a bar with dot(s) representing car(s) appear on the right side of the screen (configurable for which side of screen to show up). When car(s) pass the colored edges turn green and disappear.

As @WhyFi mentioned, the top one is the current model (RTL510). Do watch DCR and GPLama tube video reviews. You’ll have a much better idea than what I’ve summarized.

JohnJ80

And Wahoo does something similar but they also bring in the LEDs into the user interface.

Anybody else other than wahoo or Garmin users need the head end.

That said, if you ever anticipate using a non Garmin gps, but the version that has the head end display included because Garmin doesn’t sell it separately.

also, don’t bother with v1.0 (horizontal version), the taillight is all bit useless and the horizontal form factor can interfere with your thighs depending on how your bike is set up. V2.0 is by far the better unit.

Princess_Allez

The varia radar can be turned on remotely when you startup your Edge device?

JohnJ80

Yes. If the device confirms to the ant+ light spec, you can set that up.

Princess_Allez

I'll have to figure that out. I have always been turning them on independently.

kissTheApex

It’s under “light network” settings. You can set it to turn on “At device power up” or “when timer start/stop pressed” (or something to that effect).

tomato coupe

Maybe 50-150 ft. One thing you can do for fun is drop back, then sprint hard to catch up; you can see yourself on the radar.

Seattle Forrest

The vibration thing is pretty cool. I have a Garmin GPS watch (as a bike computer but also for climbing and skiing), it will vibrate on my wrist when cars are behind me. Important thing is to silence all the other alerts when you ride, so you know the vibration is telling you about a car not that you've gone another 5 miles.

A lot of people say the radar is "useless" in urban environments. You didn't say or imply that, and I'm not really disagreeing with you. Since this thread is about people looking for info, about safety, I wanted to say that it's actually useful in the city before somebody came along and convinced anyone otherwise. How useful depends on the court and the cyclist, but it's a lot more than zero in any case.

(I say that as someone who was hit from behind years ago, which lit a fire under my ass.)

Princess_Allez

I tried finding it on my Edge820... doesn't exist for me

surak

I just set it up on my Edge 520. You probably need to go into pairing mode first to make it show up as a new sensor.

str8jakett

Thanks for that info! I had never thought to check and see if Anthem offered discounts with Garmin, and it's good for $130 on Varia as well.

ridelikeaturtle

I'm having difficulty in appreciating what benefit a rider gets from a radar that tells you about an approaching car.

Do you really think you'd be able to "get out of the way" if a car was about to hit you from behind? While having advance notification of a collision might be interesting (for that brief moment while you're still upright), I can't imagine this being terribly useful once the collision has happened.

I can think of situations in a group ride where this would be super-handy to have, where you've got other bikes close behind and to the sides and back of you.

But as a collision-avoidance device, or pre-collision awareness, I don't understand the usefulness of that - especially if it's not recording anything. But I could be misunderstanding the purpose of the device. People here do seem to really love them.

WhyFi

I don't have one of these units, but I've been pondering the purchase.

Over the my last few rides, I've made a point of noting when and why I move in to lanes of traffic. If you have broad, clean shoulders and you never have to venture in to a lane, maybe it wouldn't benefit you so much... but I often have crappy shoulders with debris and hazards here and there. If I'm regularly moving in to a lane, even if only briefly to avoid a pothole, I can see this being a benefit. If there's a longer stretch of ****ty shoulder, I think it would be a nice luxury to move in to the lane, in the smooth passenger-side wheel track, and just cruise there until the shoulder improves or I get a notification of a car back.

I'm sure that someone with practical experience will be happy to chime in with regard to my expectations.

eja_ bottecchia

In your case, you don’t need the Varia.

In my riding situation, I find the Varia to be very helpful. I ride on a mix of roads, some empty rural roads and some busier roads like California’s PCH. The audible signal alerts me to incoming traffic. Then I look over my shoulder and can assess the risk factor.

The Varia’s light will start to quickly flash thus, hopefully, alerting the driver to my presence.

Atlas Shrugged

I guess you haven't read the many reasoned explanations on where the Varia is useful. It's one of those products that anyone who has used one really sees the benefit and is glad they ride with one.

ridelikeaturtle

I read a lot of statements saying, "it's great"; but it's not clear how. OK, so there's a car coming behind you, wonderful. Now what? Is that it?

When I go through the city, there's *always* a car behind you. Whenever I move lane position, first I look.

I don't see where this device - though technologically effective and certainly interesting - is doing the cyclist any favors.

Jaeger99

My thoughts exactly.

Seattle Forrest

It sounds kind you've decided it's not. That's ok too. Everybody who's used one feels differently, but first assumptions are cool too.

Jack Tone 

That's exactly why I love mine. Same road conditions out in the country. I can relax and ride where I want until it notifies me about a car, then I move to the right.

ridelikeaturtle

I like this review FAQ:

Ah, I see the point now.