Customer Reviews

Timex T5G751 Data Recorder 2

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This product works as advertised. The associated software works as well. Thus I have no complaints about the product and therefore can recommend the purchasing of this product.

However, my intended use of this product was to work in conjunction with my Timex heart rate monitor, speedometer, and watch. Thus this data recorder is part of a larger system for collecting fitness data.

I went with Timex vs. some of there competitors in this space as the watch and HR monitor were gifts. Overall I have been pleased with the system (although the HR sensors went bad sooner than I thought they should). But the Timex philosophy was to keep the size of the watch unit relatively small so that it could be used as your day to day watch. Therefore the overall system is broken up into pieces (this data recorder being one.)

To use the overall system, you have to strap on the watch, the HR band, the GPS unit, and the data recorder. Then you have to get the system working and synched up with the watch prior to starting your workout. This process, while not painful, is not elegant. Thus I am not convinced this multi-unit approach is optimal.

Again, this unit (and the overall Timex fitness system) work as advertised. If you don't mind having several units strapped to yourself to generate and record your workout information, then this system is likely something you should consider purchasing. If you would prefer a single unit that is larger but more integrated, then keep looking.

The Timex data recorder is great for training. I am in the process of training for an early summer marathon and an early fall Ironman 70.3. This product (when used with the Timex 3D GPS and heart-rate monitor) tracks altidude/elevation, speed, pace, heart rate, and longitude/latitude. It comes with PC software to capture downloads from the data recorder. I have found it to be a great way to capture feedback from my workouts.

The data recorder is an ok toy. I've had it cut out on me while it was supposed to be recording a couple of times. It doesn't link to the watch, so any timing infor from the watch is not kept. The PC program supplied with it is ok, would be much better if the plotted track could be coordinated with google maps or something of that sort. But it does a nice job of tracking work-outs and stores info in a very logical form. Overall I would just say that it is ok.

This product is wonderful at recording workout data. And it easily and reliably links with your Timex chest strap.

My only gripe is that the software is not customizable to record and categorize data more toward users' needs. But it does do a great job of tracking your workout. I give it 4 of 5 stars!

To make the data recorder work you have to watch a very dim light flash and interpret the flash pattern to know whether it is recording only the GPS, only the HRM, both, or neither. The data recorder can take a long time, and then fail to begin recording, or worse yet, start recording, and then stop unexpectedly. The watch tells you the speed, distance, heart rate, etc, but when you finish your run and try to download the data you find out the recorder stopped mid run. This is very frustrating. If the data recorder worked it would be a great product at a reasonable price, but I can not recommend it.

This works great! I've used this for all of my activities. The neat thing about this one is that it picks up the signals from your HRM and from your GPS, whether it's the regular Speed + Distance model or the latest one with GPS 3D. You can download the data to your PC and review it.

Even better... Once you activate the HRM chest monitor via your watch, you can take your watch off and the Data Recorder will continue to record signals from the chest monitor. This is very useful for me in such sports where it's not good to wear a watch, like Volleyball or Martial Arts.

Highly recommended if you have a Timex HRM and want to keep track of your heart rate stats, speed, distance, and altitude.

The recorder works, exactly as advertised. When the sensor chest band is properly worn - which might require moistening the sensor pads - and the recorder is close enough to the sensor, and the heart rate sensor on the gym equipment does not interfere, it collects and stores many hours of heart rate, or a few hours of both heart rate AND GPS data, including elevation. It measures every 2 seconds, does some smoothing (moving average) and downloads the data through a special USB cable to your PC.

But the software was a disappointment. It downloads the data into a nameless database that seems to be prone to corruption, because I have found several sites that offer Timex HRM database recovery FOR A FEE. I have lost two such files which I would like to recover, but not enough to pay for the recovery service. I do like the graphs it produces, but I would like a way to remove leading and/or trailing data, separate a single session into multiple sessions, and to display the kind of lap data (HR averages by interval) that the watch keeps. It does provide a way to MERGE sessions, which is helpful if you walk away from the recorder for a minute or two, which stops the recorder.

My normal cardio workout is 30 to 40 minutes on an elliptical machine PLUS 30-40 minutes on a treadmill. Sometimes I fail to stop the data recorder between machines, which adds the 5-10 minute recovery period between machines to the graph.
Timex T5G751 Data Recorder 2

I bought a refurb at a healthy savings and it seems to be working fine. The most cumbersome part of the heart rate monitoring system is the chest band, but this little gizmo clips easily onto accessible clothing. The pulse rate (I don't have the GPS unit) is stored every two seconds for an excellent record of cardiac activity during exercise. It seems to be quite accurate by manual and concurrent automated cross checks. It downloads automatically when connected to it's USB cable. The computer can be programmed to erase the record as soon as it is downloaded. I haven't reached its memory capacity yet, with about 20 hours in one day so far, but notice that with longer continuous sessions, it starts overwriting from the beginning of the session after several hours. This requires stopping and restarting occasionally if you're on a whole-day excursion. I presume that adding GPS data would significantly lower the available storage time.
The only downside is that it occasionally turns itself off, presumably from loss of signal which may be faulty contact of the chest strap transmitter or distance from the chest. As a tall person, I've found that this happens if I place the recorder in a pants pocket as well. Now I just clip it to my collar and find it very reliable after a heavy month of almost daily use.
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I've only been using this recorder for about 3 weeks, but I'm very pleased. I had no troubling getting it to sync with my heart rate monitor (I don't have a GPS transmitter). It does have a fairly short reception distance though. It will work on your belt area, but not much further. On a stationary bike, I clipped mine to the handlebars and a few minutes into the routine it lost synchronization. I've not had that problem if I wear it on the waist trim of shorts etc. It uploads instantly and without a hitch to the included software that allows you to track all sort of trends. The actual heart rate data can be exported as ascii data into other products to do more sophisticated analyses if you want, but the dozen or so ways to view things within the included software are very good.

This data recorder work very good. I am able to record different training sections and transfer them into my windows xp pc without any problems. Nice graphical display results.