Garmin Recommendations?

Another 305er here. Had it for a couple of years and it's still going strong. My only two gripes would be firstly that it can take ages to load up the satellites to start with (up to three minutes) - although this may be because I generally boot it up on my road which has terraced houses on both sides. It's also a bit bulky. However, battery life is great and tracking seems accurate. And yes, it does track calories based on the heart rate monitor!

Yeah the satelites are a pain- I went on a 10 minute walk yesterday (I already had the belt on from a hike I had done earlier) it took 4 minutes to get tracked - useless.

I'm trying to remember to put it on the window ledge a few minutes before I go, it seems to lock on faster if I'm not moving.

Garmin recommends that you not be moving (how's THAT for grammar!) when initializing the GPS on the 305. All said, though, 4 mins is quite a long time…

I've had a 305 for…51 weeks (been running a year!) and my SOP is to put the Garmin on the railing of my verandah, change into my running gear, and then grab the 305 on the way out the door. It's always locked on to the sats by the time I'm finishing getting dressed.

One issue to watch out for is if you're synching a 305 to Garmin Training Center. I've found that it's best to connect the 305 to its cradle and then launch GTC. As soon as GTC is active, it will attempt to download the data from your run.

The code that does download data is poor quality so it will sometimes time out even though it's started to transfer data. One trick that helps is to delete the run as soon as you've synched (and done a backup, if you're so inclined). It seems that I got more timeouts if I had more runs stored in the HRM.

The price of the 305 climbed steadily for months (I bought mine on Amazon for $125 last year) due to Garmin phasing it out.

The 305 a good device but it does not use HR to calculate cals burned. The Garmins that end in -10 use HR, the others use height/weight/time/HR and plug those into a formula.

Yeah the satelites are a pain- I went on a 10 minute walk yesterday (I already had the belt on from a hike I had done earlier) it took 4 minutes to get tracked - useless.

I'm trying to remember to put it on the window ledge a few minutes before I go, it seems to lock on faster if I'm not moving.

Garmin recommends that you not be moving (how's THAT for grammar!) when initializing the GPS on the 305. All said, though, 4 mins is quite a long time…

I've had a 305 for…51 weeks (been running a year!) and my SOP is to put the Garmin on the railing of my verandah, change into my running gear, and then grab the 305 on the way out the door. It's always locked on to the sats by the time I'm finishing getting dressed.

One issue to watch out for is if you're synching a 305 to Garmin Training Center. I've found that it's best to connect the 305 to its cradle and then launch GTC. As soon as GTC is active, it will attempt to download the data from your run.

The code that does download data is poor quality so it will sometimes time out even though it's started to transfer data. One trick that helps is to delete the run as soon as you've synched (and done a backup, if you're so inclined). It seems that I got more timeouts if I had more runs stored in the HRM.

The price of the 305 climbed steadily for months (I bought mine on Amazon for $125 last year) due to Garmin phasing it out.

The 305 a good device but it does not use HR to calculate cals burned. The Garmins that end in -10 use HR, the others use height/weight/time/HR and plug those into a formula.

This is true-- it doesn't use HRM to measure calories burned, but it does measure AVG HR, which is what you need (along with weight, gender, age, and a simple equation) to measure approx calories burned. Between the 305's measurement and using this formula, one can get a *decent* but not perfect measure of calories burned. This is still MUCH better than the available alternatives at comparable prices.

I had the 205 (just like the 305 without the heart rate monitor) and loved it. I replaced it because the battery life was starting to falter and it didn't beep anymore. I still have it actually and use it when my new one is dead (because I forgot to charge it). I now have the 210 and it's pretty good. My favorite part is it's smaller than the 205.