Review: Bryton Gardia R300 Radar

 I use my Garmin radars so much that the batteries on them that their batteries start wearing out after about 3-5 years of use. When the batteries wear out you can call Garmin and they'll give you a 20% discount on a replacement unit (there's no way to replace the battery in them). In February, there was an Amazon lightning sale on the Bryton Gardia R300 Radar where the price was $85 pre-tax, so I bought one at that price to test.

The biggest feature of the Bryton is that it charges using USB-C. That means one less cable tip to have to carry while touring. It also purportedly has better battery life. Pairing with my Garmin Edge 840 was no problem, but the ANT+ light profile doesn't really work --- the light will not turn on or off properly, nor can you set the light mode to flashing or solid from the Edge.

In use, the radar works fine --- I haven't found any false negatives or false positives that wouldn't have happened to the Garmin unit. What does happen is that on occasion the Bryton will disconnect from the head unit and immediately reconnect. That's not a big deal --- the reconnection was so fast that it wouldn't make me concerned about the safety. The fact that the head unit can't control the light mode is a bigger deal to me. Obviously the Bryton also wouldn't get firmware updates via the head unit. You have to manually connect it to your phone and then use the phone app to update it.

At $85 this unit is a steal, with the lower price and USB-C charging more than offsetting the inconvenience of manually having to turn the light on and off.  I wouldn't pay full price for the unit, but even the discounted price of the Garmin is $160, which is still more than the $110 street price the unit typically sells for at Amazon.

Garmin's acquisition of the radar unit and subsequent launch and rollout has been very successful --- that Wahoo didn't support the radar for 2 years caused me to switch head units back to Garmin. That they are only now getting serious competition for the radar light itself means that Garmin has had the time to refine and improve the unit and capture majority market share. If you don't already have a radar unit I would have no hesitation in recommending the Bryton.