Win a nuvi

PG, what we call our era pre-Garmin, we hadn’t spent much time with talking GPS units. Now we can’t go anywhere without one. My girlfriend says I’m obsessed with Betsy and Points of Interests.

The nuvi is our personal favorite, and it’s getting a big push at the Consumer Electronics Show. It even has its own blog – nuvi.blogs.com. We won’t normally give a shout-out like this, but we thought this was worth passing along. Garmin is giving away a nuvi a day during CES, four total. You don't have to attend the show. Just register here and cross your fingers. The first drawing is today!

Good luck

Comments

[Cliff McCann]

I just got the Garmin 301 for my bike. I love it

[Bryan Greenway]

I've had my Forerunner 305 now for about 6 months and have used it on just over 100 runs. These runs have mostly occurred in my home town of Franklin, TN, but I've used it around the world including England, Finland, Germany, Brazil, Canada, and several locations in the US. During all of these runs, I lost satellite reception only 3 times; it doesn't happen often, but when it does it's quite annoying. I can't seem to connect any particular environmental conditions to the loss of signal. Once I was running under a overpass bridge, but the other two times, I was right out in the open. This is very interesting in that the system was able to maintain a signal in conditions that really surprised me, such as very tight tree cover in mountainous areas. It has some functionality that I'm not sure is needed, like the mapping function on the watch, but most of the features are really cool.

Pros:
Robustness of satellite link.
Heart Rate Monitor never fails.
Distance calculation is highly repeatable and accurate.
Configurability of display is excellent.
Training Partner is lots of fun.
Ability to set up and use workouts is excellent. In particular, doing intervals and variable speed training is facilitated so well that I don't need to ever go to a track anymore...I can do these things anywhere.
Data collection into Training Center software is nice, but features are minimal (i.e. no printing capability at all).

Cons:
Can take up to 2 minutes to locate satellites.
Realtime Pace measurement/calculation is far too erradic and erroneous. The only pace value that means anything from this unit is the overall average calculated at the end of the run. I really wished this worked better.

Overall, this is a training tool that is absolutely worth the money. There have been a couple of times that I've had to train without it...I really hate not having the data from those runs!