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The Reco 81 Link's wide field of detection, consistent reliable performance and a great mounting system make it one of the better radar lights you can buy. However, connection niggles and a clunky setup mean it’s not as user-friendly as the best in class.
The Reco 81’s compact size, combined with a simple but excellent secure mount, makes it a great choice for use on road bikes.
With both Bluetooth and Ant+ connectivity, it can pair with a variety of devices and can be used with your phone. This means you don’t need a GPS head unit to get the best from the Reco’s safety features.
The Sigma impresses with its radar performance. It's accurate, quick to detect and I didn’t get any false detections or disappearing traffic.
Performance
The mount is excellent; it makes the light sit 30mm proud of the seatpost, so you can run it quite high without fear of it clashing with the rear of your saddle.
The soft insert holds the post securely and Sigma includes a second insert for narrow aero seatposts.
The small LED mounted on the side of the main unit gives colour-coded indications of which mode you are in. This also doubles as a battery-level indicator (green: 100%-50%, yellow: 50%-25% and red for below 25%), which is good to have, but you can’t see it when you're on the bike.
It’s easy to reach behind and unclip it from the quarter-turn bracket to get a look at battery level, then quickly replace it and carry on riding, but it's not an ideal thing to have to do.
The silicone strap cinches the light down well and vibrations are kept to a minimum. The Garmin-style quarter-turn interface is great; it makes removal and refitting simple and the bracket is well angled to keep the light perpendicular to the ground, reducing the chance of false readings.
Setting up the Reco 81 is a little long-winded, requiring a five-second on/off button press to fire it up, another two-second press to get into the mode selection, another press to access the Bluetooth pairing mode, and finally another press to confirm connection to your phone (with the Sigma Ride app).
You then need to go through the same process to connect to a head unit.
Battery range is a claimed 15 hours on high mode, or 27 on eco flash mode. I’m not a fan of flashing lights on a bike, so I was running the Reco in constant high mode at night and constant during the day. I found with running the responsive brake light function and radar, it achieved just over nine hours from a single charge in constant mode, which is ample for the longest rides.
It recharges via a USB-C port (Sigma includes a USB-C to USB charge cable) in just shy of three hours.
It’s built well and rated to IP67, so is protected from dust and can be submerged in one metre of water for up to 30 minutes, making it robust enough for year-round use in all weather.
The light is more than bright enough, although the relatively small lens and deep illuminated sides arguably don’t make the most of the claimed 150-lumen maximum output.
The 220-degree visibility, thanks to the lens that wraps around the flanks of the rectangular unit, could be a little deeper than the 6mm on the sides to provide better side-on visibility. That said, I had no qualms riding with it at night as my sole rear illumination.
Where the Reco impresses most is in its radar performance. Unlike plenty of its rivals, it suffered from zero false positives or false negatives during testing.
Radar limitations: ghost cars and disappearing vehicles
Because of the limitations of most radar protocols, when a vehicle is moving at the same speed as you It can go undetected or disappear from detection, which is known as a false negative.
False positives happen much less often than false negatives. It’s when your display shows a vehicle when nothing is approaching. It can happen when the radar signal reflects off metallic road furniture (a bus stop for example), traffic signs or even moving tree branches on a windy day.
You can minimise this happening by making sure you fit your radar correctly, making it perpendicular to the ground and not pointing downwards. Also make sure the fitting is secure because knocks or vibrations can upset the unit.
The Sigma copes very well with dealing with multiple vehicles approaching at different speeds, with up to eight displayed at one time. With that, I found the Reco super-helpful, especially on busy faster roads. Detection distance is a claimed 140 metres, and on the My Bike Radar Traffic app’s findings it got close to that, showing vehicles at 133m during my testing.
It does have one significant niggle, however. If you stop mid-ride for a coffee break, the light shuts down when you're not moving, which is a great feature to save battery. However, when I turned it back on, it didn’t immediately reconnect to my head unit as lights such as Garmin’s RearVue 820, BBB’s Signal Radar and Lezyne’s Radar Drive do.
Instead, I had to pull up the sensor’s menu on the head unit and reconnect manually. It’s something of an annoyance, if not a deal breaker.
You can also use it without a head unit, instead relying on your phone and the Sigma Ride app. It can also pair with compatible Sigma ‘Link’ lights, such as the Aura and Hiro, and Sigma GPS head units.
Over my test period, the Sigma Ride app indicated a couple of firmware updates that were quick to install, and hopefully another update down the line will solve the connection/reconnection woes.
The £164.99 / $199.90 / €179.95 Reco 81 is significantly cheaper than Garmin’s best-in-class Varia RearVue 820 at £259.99 / $299.99 / €299.99. It's a little cheaper than Lezyne’s excellent-value Radar Rear Drive at £170 / €169.95 / $179.99.
It is more expensive than BBB’s great-value Signal Radar BLS-251 at £119.99 / €139.95 / $209.99, and while it beats the BBB on radar functionality, the BBB’s light performance has the edge.
How we tested
I fitted the Sigma Reco 81 to a selection of bikes, using them on my road bike for rural, hilly, smaller roads including single lanes. I also fitted it to my commuter bike, riding from rural to suburban areas and into cities with faster dual-carriageway stretches and high-volume multi-lane roads.
I used both a Hammerhead Karoo and Garmin Edge 1040 Solar throughout testing.
I also used the free My Bike Radar Traffic app from the Garmin Connect store. The app provides real-time data on the radar’s detection distance and number of vehicles detected on any ride.
Sigma Reco 81 Link rear light radar bottom line
Based purely on radar-detection performance, the Reco 81 is one of the best rear radar lights I’ve tried. It doesn’t have the bells and whistles of the market-leading Garmin RearVue 820, but it is £95 / $99 cheaper.
The light performance is ample and I like the braking feature. Overall, if Sigma could cure the reconnection glitch it’d be near-perfect.
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