Master50 said:
I have a Polar 710 with the dedicated IR sensor that no longer works for me. I have upgraded all the computers to 64 bit operating systems and Polar won't provide drivers for the IR sensor. They actually told someone that it is time to upgrade anyway. I could create a 32 bit virtual environment to load the polar software and drivers for the IR sensor but I think Polar is right. It is time to take my perfectly functional 710 and just throw it away. i mean who thinks a
$500 electronic toy that has never given a problem and works perfectly shouldn't just be throw away because there are no new drivers for the computer interface or work with a mac.
Polar may have set a standard for HR monitors but fail in customer satisfaction, special unsupported drivers and crap attitude toward their customers.
My 700 is what soured me on Polar. I had a ton of problems with it; and what really p!ssed me off was that at the time I bought it, it was their top end product. The problems that I can remember are:
* IR interface issues. The interface did not work with certain operating systems, starting with XP.
* The transmitter in the speed sensor was underpowered. The sensor needed to be placed as close to the watch as possible. Even then it could be flaky. So people posted instructions on the Internet about how to open the sensor and change a jumper to increase the power. This was something Polar should have discovered if they had done adequate testing of the product.
* The chest strap was hyper sensitive to changes in skin temperature. During windy spring days, there were times when I would take a zig-zag route and I could predict when the heart rate data would cut out. I could be going west the wind would hit me in the chest, cool my skin, and the heart rate data would stop. Turn north and it would start working again. When doing a series of west then north then west turns to get ten miles north-west, it was annoying as hell.
* The chest strap was not very flexible. When traill running or even riding out of the saddle, movements of my torso could cause the strap to move slightly and that caused the heart rate data to stop. It could take quite a while for the HRM display to get going again.
* If the watch could not pick up HRM data for five minutes then it would shut down, including shutting down the recording. Later models changed the five minute time to twenty or thirty because of this.
* I decided that I would be smart about the strap issues I was having by ordering the Wearlink strap, which was almost all flexible cloth except for small transmitter in the center. It had the added benefit of being able to replace the battery. The strap, which was non-replacable, came in size M-XXL. This struck me as a really really stupid size range. With some use and sweat, the strap stretches out and it no longer fits medium. How about putting medium, you know, the average size, in the middle of the freaking range?
* Most of the problems I saw with heart rate display I think were caused by the embedded software in the device. As near as I could tell, the watch uses a window of many beats to determine the heart rate. If the time interval between two beats changes during the window then the software decides that it cannot determine an average heart rate within the window, so it enlarges the window or starts a new window.
The end result has several bad effects. First, the heart rate display is slow to update. My older Polars would register fairly instantaneous changes in heart rate. I could easily notch my effort up or down slightly while climbing and watch my heart rate quickly change. My 700 would often take significant amounts of time to show a change in heart rate. Second, the HRM display was flaky. A loss of a beat or two of heart rate data would cause the receiver to take a bunch of time to relock on a heart rate. Three, rapidly rising or falling heart rates would cause the display to display the HR in a stair step like fashion. Heart rate could go from 132 to 143 to 157 with no intermediate rates even though the changes were taking place over a minute or so. There were times when I would peg my effort at the end of running or at the top of a climb. The rapid rise in HR would cause the display to stick to the number before max effort; and after stopping, the rapidly falling HR would prevent a number from being displayed until the rate of decline had slowed. At that point my HR would be sub 120, and I would never get to see my max HR. Four, the flakiness of the HR often made recorded workouts useless because of the amount of bad data.
I do think a bunch of the problems I had were due to crappy software on the watch.
* There were times when I just wanted to use the watch to display altitude and temperature. The display of those would not stay on unless there was HR data being detected.
I think there were other problems I cannot think of at the moment. The experience did sell me on the concept of using really simple HRMs without all the bells and whistles.
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