I am now officially PO'ed at my second Polar HRM system. I am just sick and tired of the occasional HR reading of 225 bpm (yeah, like my 65 year old heart will do that). And then there is the WAY more common complete dropout to 0 bpm, despite using electrode gel. Both the wrist and chest units have fresh batteries, BTW.

I have a bicycle computer (Bontrager Ant+) that has HR capability plus I have a refurbished Garmin 800 Edge arriving soon. So what is the best Ant+ HR strap that will hopefully avoid the problems that seem to continually plague me?

Thanks.

dave

Not the Garmin straps, in my experience.

In cold weather, especially early in the ride, both my older (plastic) and newer (cloth) Garmin heart rate straps often show crazy high HR spikes. Just warming up I'll see 200+ bpm. It's not so. I've tried the HR gel, water, saliva, etc., and I've tried different shirts. I haven't found any way to reliably avoid the spikes. I haven't had the problem yet this fall. Our temperatures have been 45°+F so far.

I'm satisfied with them in general. But as it gets cold I'll have to edit on the HR spikes on many rides.

I don't know if it's the best but the Garmin is good. My wife and I both have been using them for 5 + and we are very happy with them, no problems at all. When I had my polar I had to send it back when the battery needed replacing, with the Garmin it's easy to replace.

Once at spin class the spin bike I was using broke so I jumped off and got on one on the other side of the room. I forgot to take my monitor with me. I expected most of my workout to be missing. When I got home and downloaded my workout it was all there. So Iv'e never had reason to look at anything else.

Dave

I bought a Motorola ant+ strap from Amazon to replace a Garmin strap that crapped out. It was less expensive and just as reliable as the Garmin.

The Garmin hard strap has worked pretty well for me. There are occasions, almost always when it's cool and dry weather, when it's grossly in error, but they're obvious and easy to ignore. Cool and dry usually means poor skin contact and static from flapping garments. I wet the pads on the strap with water or spit and wear close fitting cycling apparel that doesn't flap in the wind.

I use a Polar soft strap with the Garmin HR sensor. This has been more reliable for me than the Garmin soft strap. I also found that I go longer without dropouts or wacky high readings if I rinse off the strap after each ride. When the dropouts and high readings start to appear with either brand strap, so far they have come back to normal after running them through the washing machine.

I am pretty happy with my Wahoo Tickr.

+1 for the Wahoo Tickr. I use it with a Wahoo RFLKT+ and love it. No spikes, no dropouts