HRM recommendations

I got a nike heart rate monitor four or five years ago. Still works. I have replaced the battery once. It also looks like a normal watch. I think I paid $70 for it.

My wife uses a garmin that also tracks her running. I am saving for a garmin for my bike that will do mileage, heart rate and everything else. Once I get it, I will do a ride with both and see if the NIke is still accurate.

My NIke monitor simply gave me my average heart rate over the exercises and I used a web page to determine how many calories I had burned.

Have rein my bike with my Garmin 500 Edge three times. The heart rate is the same, but the Garmin calculates calories burned. It is about 60% of what I had been calculating earlier. And, about 33% of what this web page gives a a default setting for my cycling with the and no heart rate. Will trust the Garmin numbers from now on. Maybe that is part of the reason I did not lose any weight in the past month. I might be eating more than I should.

Another vote for the Polar FT4. Love mine to bits.

The only upside to going up a level to the FT7 (or at least the only advantage I can see) is that it is compatible with their upload software, so you can automatically upload your results to their polarpersonaltrainer.com website. If that's something you might want to do, it' s probably worth the few extra bucks.

Otherwise, the FT4 will probably give you all you need.

The Polar FT4 won't link to your computer & upload data, and that's a feature I wanted so I looked at both the FT7 and FT40.
I recently purchase the Polar FT40 based on this:
http://www.livestrong.com/article/460340-ft7-vs-ft40-polar-heart-rate-monitor-watch/

Love it.