Sorry, Francois

Okay, if I'm going to blog I need to do it daily. I let things slip and missed a comment from I nice person named Francois inre the Polar iRDA interface. The answer is I never even suspected the CS600 would work with the old interface so I didn't even try at the time. Polar is a very frustrating company. They tease you. First they offer power monitoring for about half the price of any real competitor (notwithstanding the latest from iBike, I'll believe it when I see it) but then you find the IR interface is an extra $50. The installation involves wanting to grow an additional appendage and then it drops out seemingly at random during use. When this happens I stop and move the pickup unit a couple of millimeters (really!) and we're back online. The AAA batteries in the power unit seem to last a random amount of time, sometimes as little as 60 hours (vs the published 300 or so). But then they include some cool software which does almost everything you want.
In spite of all this I found myself defending the Polar in a class my coach was giving on using power measurement to reach training goals. In his opinion the Polar was marginal. This was based on the fact that most of his clients who tried the Polar later switched to the more expensive PowerTap or SRM and I was the only person who made the Polar work consistently. He related that there were numerous complaints about the PowerTap, especially the wired one. It appeared the SRM was pretty trouble free, but that may be due to the maintenance being handled by team mechanics or household servants.
I guess everyone lives somewhere on the "Frustration-Money Curve". The more money you have, the less frustraion you need to bear up with (unless acquiring the money is frustrating - which brings up a different discussion). For me, there were two sound reasons that the other systems seemed crazy. First, you could buy an additional bike for the price of either one. Second, hubs and cranks wear out - I like the "no moving parts" feature.