I’ve been looking for a heart rate monitor for some time now. My Nike watch recently bit the dust (strap disintegrated) and so it was time to pop for a new one. After some research I took the plunge with the Polar RS200, bought on eBay for about $180. The one I got came with a chest-strap and foot-pod.

I’ve worked out with it three times (two runs and once in the weight room) and have to say I’m pretty happy with it.

The foot-pod is only required for jogging. I’ve done about 12miles on it and it’s worked flawlessly. Seems it’s pretty well calibrated out of the box but I’m standard height (6′) for this type of thing. If you have the need you can calibrate it specific to your stride and cadence.

The belt is comfortable and after a few mins I forget it’s there. The watch itself tracks all sorts of information, heart rate, bpm, training zone, speed, distance, stopwatch, auto-laps and totals & averages of same.

Best part is you can download data from the watch to your computer and then upload it to the http://polarpersonaltrainer.com website via web services. At first I didn’t get it as the box had no USB cables and I figured my watch model didn’t support this feature. Turns out it does and it works by sound! SonicLink lets you chose a workout from the watch, then squeal it over to your computer via the microphone. It sounds like an old commodore 64 tape loading. Works reasonably well for my purposes.

Last thing is the ability to upload data to the watch. This works using sound also, you hold the watch close to your computer speaker and it squeals the data over in high pitched blips and bleeps.  You can use your computer to enter your vital statistics like height, weight, age and so on.  The RS200 has a rather large dot-matrix display and you can actually beam over your own little image to display in that space. I made a little "Live Strong" logo and beamed it over so now I have a constant reminder on my wrist, sort of a daily affirmation.