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Week in Review: August 4th, 2025

August 4, 2025 by |Sports Technology News and Reviews|Comments (19)

The Week in Review is a collection of both all the goodness I’ve written during the past week around the internet, as well as a small pile of links I found interesting – generally endurance sports related. I’ve often wondered what to do with all of the coolness that people write, and while I share a lot of it on Twitter/X and BlueSky, this is a better forum for sending it on to y’all. Most times these different streams don’t overlap, so be on the lookout at all these places for good stuff!

So with that, let’s get into the action!

DCR Posts In The Past Week:

I’ve been out in the Alps testing upcoming things, as well as checking out the Women’s Tour de France, so stuff is a bit quiet right now. Here are all the latest posts on the site:

Wednesday: FIT File: Summer Cycling Roundup! New Bike Computers, Groupsets, Wheels, Trainers, and More

Thursday: Tour de France Femmes 2025: What Bike Computers & Sports Tech Are They Using?

YouTube Videos This Week:

Here’s what hit the tubes over on the You of Tube, definitely don’t forget to subscribe there to get notified of videos the second they hit!

YouTube video

YouTube video

Stuff I Found Interesting Around The Interwebs:

Here’s a not-so-small smattering of all the random things that I stumbled on while doing my civic duty to find the end of the Internet:

1) Insta360 To Start Making Drones: This article is actually interesting because it outlines some big changes that are happening in this space. While DJI announced their first 360 action cam this past week (bought one, review soonish), Insta360 inversely announced an upcoming drone. DJI’s 360-action cam entrant is very strong (albeit with some quirks). And while I’ve flown the Insta360 drone, I’ll save my thoughts for later once it’s officially unveiled/announced. However, more important than the tech, is actually the US market, which is massive for both companies. DJI is pulling out (or being forced out) of the US market, as evidenced by numerous recent launches and their official statements, owing mostly to their impending ban at the end of the year. Thus, Insta360’s biggest advantage is the simple fact that soon DJI won’t be able to sell any products in the US (the ban specifically covers wireless chipsets, which is basically every product with Bluetooth or WiFi, including all cameras/drones/etc…). Whether or not Insta360 can take advantage of that remains to be seen. Likewise, whether we see other drone companies, like Skydio, get back into the consumer market remains to be seen.

2) The comparative impact of riding the full Tour de France as an amateur: I had opened up this tab weeks ago, but only finished reading it yesterday. This piece was *far* better than I expected, to be honest. Turns out there was a study done on what happens when a group of amateur riders go out and ride the full length of the Tour de France in one go, the day before the TdF. And then compared that to TSS/HR/sleep/etc values of pro riders. Super interesting.

3) Whoop’s Medical Mess: This happened a few weeks ago, but is worth mentioning somewhere. Essentially, Whoop marketed the new Whoop MG as a ‘Medical Grade’ device. And indeed, the ECG feature was certified by the FDA & EU as such. However, the blood pressure piece was very much not certified as such. And the FDA is pretty angry about it. What’s super interesting though in this letter is looking at the timelines. It appears, quite clearly, that Whoop was hiding the blood pressure piece from the FDA, while concurrently working on the ECG piece. You can see in that FDA letter that Whoop met with the FDA on May 15th, just a mere 7 days after Whoop launched/announced the Whoop MG. In other words, someone from the FDA likely saw the announcement and did a ‘WTF?!?’, and thus the flurry of documented meetings immediately following the announcement. Look, I actually think Whoop’s estimations are pretty good in my testing, but that doesn’t mean it’s a medical device – and all of Whoop’s marketing is heavily aimed at pretending it is. Before seeing the FDA letter, and hearing the story, I was vaguely agreeing with Whoop, but after reading that FDA letter (seriously, read the full thing), it’s a solid smackdown of Whoop’s actions.

4) Fitbit Charge 6 gets expanded HR broadcasting: This now also includes Hydrow & Hydrow Wave rowers, Spinning bikes, and Echelon machines. That’s in addition to Strava, Wahoo, Zwift, and more. Though they specifically note both Garmin & TechnoGym don’t work. My guess here is that this comes down to the craptasticness that is the encrypted Bluetooth standard for a secure BT HR signal. Who to blame in this case is anyone’s guess (last time there was a BT broadcasting failure between Amazfit & Garmin devices, it was because AmazFit was incorrectly tagging the BT connection as secured, and thus Garmin completed a secured pairing, which promptly failed when Amazfit didn’t then follow-up with a proper secure channel for the actual data. Amazfit has since fixed that).

5) CYCPLUS L7 Radar Review – Another Low Budget Failure: I really wish that lower budget radars didn’t suck, but by and large, they do. Shane does a good job of outlining how this recent entrant fails. Notably, one of the things I’ve seen with radar testing is that it simply takes a CRAPTON of hours on the bike with comparative radar units to know when a specific unit is failing. It’s largely why my Wahoo TRACKR radar review isn’t out yet. Just when I think I’ve got it all figured out and it’s working well, it goes off and repeatedly craps itself. Sigh. Kinda at the point there of ‘it is what it is’, and hitting publish like GPLAMA (one of the reasons I tend to delay negative reviews is to ensure I’m not the one screwing up, I’m reasonably confident at this point with multiple units, multiple reviewers, conversations with Wahoo, and months of data, I’m not the issue here). Anyways, for something much more ‘eeks’, here’s Shane’s CYCPLUS L7 Radar Review:

YouTube video

–

Ok, I didn’t really plan on typing up that much about each one of these. Typically, it’s like a line or two. Thus, we’ll just leave it here for now.

Thanks for reading!

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19 Comments

  1. Frank
    August 4, 2025 at 10:55 am #1

    „ I tend to delay negative reviews is to ensure I’m not the one screwing up“

    I hope this is not the reason we are still waiting for the Venu X1 in-depth review?

    Reply
  2. Franck
    August 4, 2025 at 1:06 pm #3

    Should we understand that you don’t share GPLama’s enthusiasm for the Wahoo Trackr?

    Reply
    • Ray Maker
      August 4, 2025 at 1:48 pm #4

      I think we started in the same spot with liking it, and about 90-95% of the time, it’s great. But I continue to see struggles in two key areas:

      1) Tracking of slowly moving/speed-matching vehicles behind me. Wahoo very quickly disappears these, even though they are still there. Garmin (and Trek) do a *far* better job at holding lock on that vehicle for a really long time before dropping it due to same-speed match.

      2) Substantial phantom false positives, including some pretty crazy ones similar to what GPLAMA has seen on various budget radars.

      Additionally, there’s a lesser issue in that the TRACKR has a narrower field of view compared to Garmin’s radar. As such, on twisting/turning mountain roads, it’ll detect vehicles far later than Garmin, because Garmin is detecting the vehicles better on curves.

      Lama and I have talked and shared tests extensively on it (on a near daily basis). I suspect my road conditions (including mountain passes) are more challenging than his, which may be contributing. However, my biggest crazy phantom cars was on a very straight and wide open roads. He’s been working to reproduce some of my issues, though without much luck. DesFit has been able to reproduce most of my issues. And Wahoo has confirmed that the issues exist, and that they are working to tune things.

      Reply
    • Paul
      August 5, 2025 at 8:40 am #5

      Lama loves everything Wahoo

      Reply
  3. Guillermo
    August 4, 2025 at 6:08 pm #6

    Man, every time I start feeling the temptation to buy a Whoop, something new comes out.

    Reply
  4. hdb
    August 4, 2025 at 6:57 pm #7

    I also thought the Escape Collective article on the amateurs riding the Tour route was good (as is most of the work there, in my opinion).

    Another excellent one was about the power on the climbs and speeds on the descent for l’Étape vs the pros: link to escapecollective.com

    Reply
  5. ArT
    August 5, 2025 at 3:12 am #9

    But the radar alerts on Garmin look awful. How can you design alerts that cover up the main data on the display? It’s a disaster.

    Reply
    • Ray Maker
      August 5, 2025 at 5:08 am #10

      In this case though, I’m not talking about display of the alerts. Doesn’t matter what bike computer you use, the protocol is standardized.

      That said, most of the native data fields don’t tend to have data on that portion of the Edge. The one shown in Lama’s video is a Connect IQ data field for wind/etc, which crams as much data into the space as possible (it’s a cool CIQ field, but just FYI). Either way, I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone complain about the alert covering things up.

      Reply
    • LoneLeaf
      August 5, 2025 at 10:39 am #11

      I’ve had the radar strip cover parts of my data fields when using layouts with 2 data fields per row. But moving the radar strip from the left side of the screen to the right improved it since it just covers up the units there instead of the values. Maybe that helps, cheers

      Reply
    • Paul S.
      August 5, 2025 at 2:07 pm #12

      The radar strip on my Edge 1040 is translucent, anyway. You can see through it. I use the Windfield app and have no trouble with the radar strip, but I don’t put a lot of essential data on that page since I use auto scroll. Not knowing the percentage cloud cover or the current temperature for a few seconds isn’t vital.

      Reply
  6. MatthewQC
    August 7, 2025 at 12:54 pm #13

    I have to admit, I am the Sickos/“Ha ha ha! Yes!” meme when it comes to when you or Shane do reviews absolutely castigating dumpster fire products. I used to think I was a bad person for this, but then I realized the actual bad people were the companies prepared to sell complete garbage for a quick buck, and they deserve the review they got. Especially when it comes to items for safety of the user.

    Reply
  7. Thomas
    August 7, 2025 at 3:55 pm #14

    You must be very cautious when flying your stuff in Spain, right?

    Sorry, link is in German…
    link to heise.de

    Reply
    • Ray Maker
      August 7, 2025 at 5:16 pm #15

      It’s not all that different than the rest of the EU, as it’s one single policy across the board. I’ve got multiple EU drone licenses (as well as US & Canadian licenses, including a US commercial license). The single biggest difference in Spain, is simply that so much of the territory on the islands/mountains/coastline is no-fly zones (usually tied to some parkland designation). This is quite a bit different from France or the Netherlands, which both certainly have no-fly areas, but nowhere near as vast as Spain’s.

      Ultimately, I just know my specific flyable areas really well. I’m kinda lucky in that I live in a tiny little pocket that let’s me get some amazing shots right out my front door. Yet a kilometer or two in either direction is either the extended airport no-fly zone, or a parkland of sorts. I spend tons of time every time I fly double-checking the maps haven’t changed (as they do change, in fact, my exact house actually went from no-fly zone to flyable zone this past year, though it didn’t matter too much, as just across the street was previously flyable anyway).

      In the fall I’ll file permits to do some flying in the parkland (it’s a former military base decades ago, and is basically just deserted nothingness that sees very few people when I’m out riding;running). In theory the permit process for that specific area is pretty easy (6-month permits). But…we’ll see. If not, no biggie.

      As for that specific story, I’ve seen variations of that piece. I’ll be honest, something doesn’t fit right. It happens a lot with drone-incident news, a long game of telephone where the puzzle pieces don’t add up. This one doesn’t make a lot of sense for a lot of reasons, and seems to mostly be one outlet re-writing another outlet’s story and on and on. I think there’s nuggets of truth in that story, but I suspect only specs of it.

      Reply
  8. Calcium
    August 8, 2025 at 4:21 pm #16

    Is there an ETA for your review for the new whoop devices? I’ve been waiting to hear your thoughts before pulling the trigger (or staying far away) 😆

    Reply
  9. Pete
    August 9, 2025 at 11:05 pm #17

    Really hoping Coros comes out with a radar that works well and has the same crazy battery life magic that the rest of their products do. Also still waiting for the official DC Dura review.

    Reply
  10. Neil A
    August 11, 2025 at 5:54 pm #18

    So we’re all left waiting for the Garmin Varia RTL5** (usbC) refresh model to be announced then?

    Off topic – is there any reason why Garmin doesn’t have an optical HR armband to compete with Polar/Coros? Is it a technical standpoint or a marketing thing maybe?

    Reply
  11. SourJellyBeans
    August 11, 2025 at 9:33 pm #19

    FYI new Suunto app update just dropped, more options to show “Last 7 days” for stats instead of just “This week”.

    Reply