Team BKool CycleChat

[CXRAndy]

I’m getting the strong sense some of you guys won’t be persuaded to join Saturdays re-run. Anyone planning on doing it?

Make sure you challenge either Paul, Bill Me to get everyone in your attempt. If you stay on my wheel you could well take the win, you climb much better than I do, so keeping Paul at bay or stick with Paul and out run him on the descent.

 

[Whorty]

I’m getting the strong sense some of you guys won’t be persuaded to join Saturdays re-run. Anyone planning on doing it?

I need to do the run again after needing to bail tonight. Not sure what time I'll do it Saturday though, will depend on HID.

 

[peterob]

I’m getting the strong sense some of you guys won’t be persuaded to join Saturdays re-run. Anyone planning on doing it?

I'm aiming on being there. Maybe the only one!

 

[theboxers]

I’m getting the strong sense some of you guys won’t be persuaded to join Saturdays re-run.

Anyone planning on doing it?

 

[theboxers]

The climb did look brutal though. I noticed that Bill had a cadence <40 rpm for a lot of the climb - I'm extra worried for my attempt on Saturday as I haven't got particularly low gearing on at the moment and I'm fearing for the sake of my knees!

The Pro trainer can sometimes throw odd cadence values because it does not have a true cadence sensor. Bill was probably doing 75 to 80 at least. That was still a beast of a climb though

 

[AAAC 76C]

What's the matter you have a couple of 8% sections to recover after the 11% and 12% bits ... That last 6Km descent isn't plain sailing either, starting with a 8.4% Uphill, and the finish hits 6.5% in the last 100m . To be honest it does remind me of doing Great Dun Fell where you were using the 8% sections to recover after the relentless 18-20% bits, before the next steep ramp

When having 2 teenagers at home, and now currently just having the 20Year Old gaming son left, I repurposed an old pentium PC as a Smoothwall (a hardware firewall), this gives me 4 network segments Red - Direct access to the internet with no logging or protection, Green, Purple and Orange. Green is most open, in that you can allow pinholes through the firewall to devices on that segment. The other two can only be allowed to see devices on the other internal segments. The good thing I discovered is that I can also set Qos (Quality of Service) on different types of traffic (Gaming, Streaming etc) and differently on each segment. Now the Green segment, which is where most of the devices connect to has QoS set up with a restriction of 20% of the bandwidth available to gaming and streaming, the other segments have no restriction so my cycling devices can happily run at up to 100Mbps/6Mbps, or 80% of that.

Devious?? Moi?

Was that in English?

 

[AAAC 76C]

Moi

 

[peterob]

The Pro trainer can sometimes throw odd cadence values because it does not have a true cadence sensor. Bill was probably doing 75 to 80 at least. That was still a beast of a climb though

Ah - that may well explain it. I certainly hope so!

 

[perswe]

I might not want to do that again.
I was looking forward (well...) to a nice and flat road up to the hill, but no. There just had to be bumps all over the place. I don't care much for bumps.

The start? Nailed it! Did it do me any good? Nope. Could not keep the up with @keithaitch @Brusgaard and @BILL S and had to throw in the towel after only...what was it...3-4 miles? Well done!
So a pretty lonely ride for me. Managed to find my own pace though, and stopped losing time eventually. Made a mistake not to latch on the the 1st spaniard as he passed me, to the foot of the hill. Perhaps I could have gotten even closer in the end. Felt pretty ok uphill...so perhaps I should have tried a litter harder for a little longer to stay with the three wise men ahead in the beginning. Pretty happy with the time anyway...
Well done everyone!

 

[JJRobinson]

I’m getting the strong sense some of you guys won’t be persuaded to join Saturdays re-run. Anyone planning on doing it?

I will be aiming to try and get it done on Saturday sometime but won’t be able to make 17:00 run

 

[AAAC 76C]

Regarding Internet speeds and WiFi, and with apologies to those of you who are IT experts (and those who prefer to talk about cycling rather than technology)...

I'm not sure how much data flows up to bkool (your speed, cadence, heart rate, etc.) compared to how much comes down from them (other riders positions) and how much is pre-downloaded so it can continue if the connection breaks (gradient changes). If I still had mine setup I could monitor the traffic flow in both directions, does anyone else have a decent router (e.g. Draytek Vigor) with traffic monitoring?

With normal broadband the upload is a bit rubbish (<1 Mbps) but download can be acceptable (c. 8-16 Mbps). Fibre is much better, with 10 or 20 Mbps upload and up to 40 or 80 Mbps download. Cable can be a bit better, but all these are contended, i.e. shared with other users as they over sell the exchanges bandwidth by up to 20 to 1, as people rarely use the bandwidth continuously.

Netflix or iPlayer streaming a Full HD (1080p) program uses around 3 GBytes per hour, so around 0.5 Mbits per second (Mbps) download, so shouldn't affect most decent broadbands connections too badly. Gaming could be worse, I guess.

If you can get an Ethernet cable all the way to your computer that is by far the best option, as it can be a dedicated (switched) 1 Gbps connection.

Failing that, using powerline adapters to use the mains and Ethernet wires to complete the link will give around 100-400 Mbps (AV200 to AV1200) but the powerline bit is shared between all devices using it, if you have multiple powerline adapters and/or multiple devices using them.

WiFi can be as slow as 11 (b) or 54 (g) Mbps, but more recent wireless n or the latest ac are rated at 130 Mbps or higher, depending on channel width, number of aerials at both ends, etc. so should be at least as fast as your broadband. However, real throughput (after protocol overheads) will be lower, speeds fall away with distance and intervening obstacles such as walls and again it is shared between all devices using the wireless network (SSID). Any wireless extenders will only slow things down further, as can neighbours WiFi if they are close enough and overlap channels.

So try to use an Ethernet wire or powerline adapter if you can, but some devices like tablets and phones may have to use WiFi. In this case it can help to use a dedicated wireless access point and/or powerline adapter to create a separate wifi hotspot (use a different SSID and keep the encryption key secret) so you have the whole bandwidth to yourself and the hot spot is in the same room as your device. This should make your connection much more robust!

One last point; bandwidth is not the only concern, as latency can also affect the performance. This is the time for data to start flowing at one end and first reach the other end, and possibly return a reply (round trip time). Even with high bandwidth, latency can be low, e.g. a very wide but very long pipe will carry a lot of water, but it will take ages for the water to get from one end to the other. You can get an idea of latency by looking at the ping time, which should be around 10-20 ms.

Cheers,

Geoff

You can watch your ping rate in BSim along with Frames Per Second I believe.

 

[theboxers]

Moi

Twice, with a 2 year gap between each, is enough for me

 

[<Tommy>]

Make sure you challenge either Paul, Bill Me to get everyone in your attempt. If you stay on my wheel you could well take the win, you climb much better than I do, so keeping Paul at bay or stick with Paul and out run him on the descent.

Appreciate the confidence in me bud but I’ll be in survival mode I reckon!

Glad so many of you guys are doing it Saturday. I’m going to try and do stage 2 too if I can make time if anyone fancies or needs a go at that.

 

[keithaitch]

I might not want to do that again.
I was looking forward (well...) to a nice and flat road up to the hill, but no. There just had to be bumps all over the place. I don't care much for bumps.

The start? Nailed it! Did it do me any good? Nope. Could not keep the up with @keithaitch @Brusgaard and @BILL S and had to throw in the towel after only...what was it...3-4 miles? Well done!
So a pretty lonely ride for me. Managed to find my own pace though, and stopped losing time eventually. Made a mistake not to latch on the the 1st spaniard as he passed me, to the foot of the hill. Perhaps I could have gotten even closer in the end. Felt pretty ok uphill...so perhaps I should have tried a litter harder for a little longer to stay with the three wise men ahead in the beginning. Pretty happy with the time anyway...
Well done everyone!

it's really hard to judge for those of us who think we have an advantage on the steep climbs as you do definitely do @perswe. I paid today for using up too much energy staying with bill and brusgaard on the bumpy bit before the climb and then couldn't drop them on the climb, was caught just after the top and knew I didn't have enough to stay with them. I noticed you gaining on me at the end, but it spurred me for the last two kms...thx!

 

[keithaitch]

Appreciate the confidence in me bud but I’ll be in survival mode I reckon!

Glad so many of you guys are doing it Saturday. I’m going to try and do stage 2 too if I can make time if anyone fancies or needs a go at that.

jesus Tommy that's a lot of climbing!