DAB+

Tonight I discovered to my joy that my old (launched circa 2008) faithful Pure Evoke Flow DAB radio already has DAB+ built in.

AND, that the new-ish second UK national commercial multiplex now (as of quite recently) has a few DAB+ stations on it.
So I tried them, and it works.

Hurray....

However, they are transmitting at 28kbps...

Not so impressive from a sound quality viewpoint. Nevermind. It's still cool.

Analysing my bicycle gear usage (Alfine 8)

So, I've downloaded a couple of months' worth of bike commuting data from my Garmin Vivoactive (including cadence sensor data). Converted it using perl script tcx2csv.pl (thanks!). And I figured I could back-analyse the data to calculate what gear I was in at any given time. This proved to be not as accurate as I hoped, probably because the granularity of the time intervals is quite long, hence instead of seeing calculated gear ratios clustered around the actual known ones, I got almost a smooth curve with thousands of apparent gear ratios.

But the data is OK, if you accept the limitations.

So here's a simple frequency plot from Excel:

The bars show gears 1 through to 8, and then finally the last bar is "no data" or (probably mainly) freewheeling.

End conclusions:
1. My overall final drive ratio for my Shimano Alfine-8 is probably about OK for my usage, since I don't spend that much time in top gear. If I spent a lot of time in top gear (which is realistically limited to about maybe 25mph) then I'd probably be looking to drop the rear cog down from 20 to 18 teeth. But I don't, so it's all good...
2. I spend a lot of time not pedalling...
3. I spend quite a lot of time in gear 5, which on Alfine is "direct drive". However I am not sure that means truly direct drive, rather it simply means 1:1 ratio. So I don't think you necessarily get any efficiency benefit.

Happy days. The joys of having telemetry on your bike, eh?!

Oh, and the bottom gear is plenty low enough for Bristol's hills.

So far then, the hub gear experiment is looking good!

Pictures of where I live

 So, one of my pics for a recent competition. Didn't win anything, but was very pleased with the shots I got. Shows what you can see if you get up at 5.30am...