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Product Review of The CatEye Cordless Cyclocomputer

© Joseph Pucci

I bought my first CatEye Cordless Cyclocomputer in December 1999. Before that I owned a wired CatEye Cyclocomputer, which worked fine on my road bike for many years. One of the features that I liked about the Cordless unit was it ability to be switched between two different wheel circumference settings, which allow the Cordless unit to easily be switched between two different bikes. Now I could use the same computer on both my road and mountain bikes, while easily keeping track of overall distance. This feature worked as expected.

As soon as I mounted the cordless unit on to my mountain bike I started to get a bad omen about the product. I couldn’t get the transmitter to send to the computer unless I held the unit very close. I had to remount the transmitter as near to the top of my fork as possible. Even then the unit would work intermittently unless the computer was positioned at just the right angle. After what seemed like a endless number of tweaks and adjustment, the unit appeared to be working.

The keyword was appeared, because it continued to work intermittently for about two months and then stopped working completely. I was determined to get this thing to work correctly. I became a bit obsessed with it, because I started to doubt that I followed the installation instructions correctly, after all it was almost new, it should be working. I decided that the batteries may need to be changed, so I changed out the batteries and it did improve. The next few months were trouble free. I figured my cordless computer problems were behind me.

Not so fast kids, in the first week of November the temperatures start to hold below 40 degrees Fahrenheit and the transmitter stopped working again. If I return the bike to warmer temperatures and gave it time to acclimate, the transmitter would start to work again, but only at temperatures above 42 degrees Fahrenheit. I had another transmitter on my road bike and it seemed to work in any temperature. This prompted me to switch the mountain bike transmitter with the road bike transmitter. Oddly, I ended up with the same problem. The transmitter on the mountain bike stopped working at 42 degrees Fahrenheit and returned to normal operation above that temperature.

The CatEye Product support page suggested that the problem is not the computer but in the transmitter or sensor. I swapped the parts from two units and got the same results, so I think I don’t think that’s the problem either. I did find an interesting note in the support files at the CatEye web site, under title of “Display response is slow:

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