Tech doesn’t have to be expensive. Last September I loaded my steel Wilier Jaroon gravel bike with bedding, spares and sweet treats, boarded a ferry from Southampton to Bilbao, then set off across the pre-Pyrenees to Barcelona. To find my way, I relied on nothing more than the navigation on my Garmin Edge 530’s 2.6inch (66mm) screen. No paper maps, no phone - I was concerned about battery life - and no fellow travellers who knew the way. Just me and my little Edge 530.
It performed flawlessly. Not only did I make it to Barcelona without once getting lost, I then caught a second ferry to Palma, Mallorca, crossed the island and spent a week touring the magnificent Serra de Tramuntana mountain range. Again, the little Edge 530 worked a treat.
The Edge is almost as feature-rich as its bigger, more expensive siblings, such as the Edge 1040 Solar and Edge 1050. I used it for navigation, tracking my heart rate and to display approaching cars located by my Garmin Varia RTL515 Radar. I didn’t use a power meter, but if you do, the Edge 530 will be able to relay figures from that too. In fact, it can crunch a seemingly endless amount of data, returning almost every kind of cycling metric you can imagine.
Why is it so cheap? Firstly, it’s equipped with big, chunky buttons rather than a touchscreen, but I don’t regard that as a disadvantage at all. In fact, it can be advantageous when wearing full-finger gloves.
Secondly, although it’s still being sold by Garmin and other retailers, strictly speaking, it has been superseded by Edge 540, which now has multiband GNSS, free-style ClimbPro mode and slightly improved battery life. All nice-to-have features, but none are critical and they add significantly to the price.
The Edge 530 was accurate enough to take me across Spain, it does have ClimbPro while navigating a course, and the battery life is already more than sufficient. The Edge 530 is also much lighter than the Edge 1040 and 1050, a fact not lost on climbers and weight weenies.
While the Edge 530 and 540 have quite small screens, many riders are fine with this. After all, who wants to ride with a computer the size of a small brick on their bars?
