Forums >Gears and Wears>Garmin's MTA (Ant Agent) is crap
I have the 405CX and I love it, it's one of the best things I've ever bought (well, received). It doesn't see the satellite/s on really overcast days, but 99% of the time it's great. It has an auto-pause, and although I appreciate it's not going to be exact, in the grand scheme of life it doesn't matter if my pace on mile 6 on Thursday the 4th was 8:06 or 8:00.
There have been many times where I've been in a race or on the road and thought how bad I felt, how difficult the race was, how I really wasn't enjoying it, how I thought I was fitter than that, and I look down at my trusty garmin and find that I'm doing a 6:30. After I slow my pace to what I should be doing, suddenly the world is a beautiful place again. Garmin's are a girl's best friend.
Anytime you deal with outer space things get a bit dicey.
I just wanted to acknowledge this line.
"If you have the fire, run..." -John Climacus
Oh, nice idea, but it works the wrong way.
That depends on your frame of reference. And whether there are any very heavy runners who happen to be twins in the vicinity.
The process is the goal.
Men heap together the mistakes of their lives, and create a monster they call Destiny.
I have the 405CX and I love it, it's one of the best things I've ever bought (well, received). It doesn't see the satellite/s on really overcast days, but 99% of the time it's great. It has an auto-pause, and although I appreciate it's not going to be exact, in the grand scheme of life it doesn't matter if my pace on mile 6 on Thursday the 4th was 8:06 or 8:00. There have been many times where I've been in a race or on the road and thought how bad I felt, how difficult the race was, how I really wasn't enjoying it, how I thought I was fitter than that, and I look down at my trusty garmin and find that I'm doing a 6:30. After I slow my pace to what I should be doing, suddenly the world is a beautiful place again. Garmin's are a girl's best friend.
+1! Except:
2017 Goals1) Run more than 231 miles2) Be ready for HM in the spring
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Hey, I ran faster than you. No you didn't, *I* ran faster than *you*.
It's a 5k. It hurt like hell...then I tried to pick it up. The end.
By my calculations a Garmin attached to a proton in TRIUMF's cyclotron would weigh approximately 87 pounds, so it would take a very heavy runner indeed to wear one.
The main point of my rant is two fold.
First, the Ant Agent is garbage.
Second, gamin's firmware (in the FR60 and 310 XT at least) is shit and buggy as hell. It would be great if Garmin would actually test their firmware updates to see what has gotten screwed up every time they attempt to fix a bug.
Maybe the 405 is working great for some of you, but the fr60 and 310xt have had problems from the get go and the Ant Agent seems to not be much better. I had a 405CX and returned it because the bezel was f'ed up, the battery didn't last very long and the screen was to small to read.
I bought an FR60 because it had the foot pod and HR monitor for 100 and I'm cheap. I really don't care if I get a fancy little map drawn out that shows where I ran and how many houses I've run over the top of. I was there so I know where I ran and I don't need the GPS to show me. I just want the watch to keep track of my mileage, HR, time and give me the option to upload to RA or ST without any hassles. There have been and continue to be hassles with these watches.
The pain that hurts the worse is the imagined pain. One of the most difficult arts of racing is learning to ignore the imagined pain and just live with the present pain (which is always bearable.) - Jeff
2014 Goals:
Stay healthy
Enjoy life
In my experience with Garmin, it is best to leave well enough alone. That is, if I don't have any problems uploading to RA, then I will not upgrade the Garmin Communicator or flash to the latest firmware. I know of one instance where upgrading the plugin introduced a problem that prevented me from uploading my data.
Since I don't have a Garmin device that supports Ant, could someone tell me what happened this time? Are you required to upgrade/flash or can you ignore it? Does reinstalling the Communicator plugin fix the problem?
I have not had any problems with my 310 or the ANT (except for the little upgrade glitch that Eric has now fixed.
Eric- I THINK I was forced to do the upgrade, but I could be wrong. It seemed like it sort of just happened.
Out there running since dinosaurs roamed the earth
In my experience with Garmin, it is best to leave well enough alone. That is, if I don't have any problems uploading to RA, then I will not upgrade the Garmin Communicator or flash to the latest firmware. I know of one instance where upgrading the plugin introduced a problem that prevented me from uploading my data. Since I don't have a Garmin device that supports Ant, could someone tell me what happened this time? Are you required to upgrade/flash or can you ignore it? Does reinstalling the Communicator plugin fix the problem?
I have two FR60's, one for my wife and one for myself. When I got the one for my wife, I was having troubles with pairing the foot pod. Upon advice from Garmin support, I upgraded the firmware to the most current ver 2.6 and was told that would solve the problem. Apparently the problem was with the foot pod and not the firmware. Garmin sent me a new foot pod and I though all was well.
After 2.6 was loaded, I had to pair with the computer every time and after doing some investigating I found out it was a bug in 2.6 that was causing that. Garmin support sent me a file to convert back to 2.5 and everything was working again.
Last week I upgraded my FR60 to 2.7 after I was having problems in which the stopped time was being added to the mile split that the stopped time occurred in. As it turned out, that didn't solve the problem. The problem was with the up-loader? Anyway, I seemed the 2.7 firmware was working, so I tried to upgrade my wifes watch. When I did, the firmware upgrade was loaded to the Ant Agent and sat there for quite some time. I finally got it to send to her watch and after a few minutes, The Ant Agent said it had transferred 100% and the watch was loading the firmware. When the watch finished its upgrade, I had to reset all the personal data, but the Ant Agent still had the upgrade 100% screen, so I exited the Ant Agent.
Yesterday I open the Ant Agent to upload a workout a workout and the Ant Agent had a message that the FR60 firmware was ready to load, but both watches already had 2.7 on them. I couldn't transfer data from either watch because I was getting a transfer failed error. I removed the Ant agent program and reloaded it several times and now it crashes and can't seem to find the workouts from the watch.
Its not a problem on your end and the Ant Agent that I have at work seems to be working, but I still can't tell if the stopped time is included in the mile lap from my fr60. It is in another program I use, SportTracks.