Wondering if anyone has any experience of the above? Thinking of getting a bluetooth heart rate monitor for my galaxy s2 as I use it for gps already. Just worried about signal getting to the phone in the backpack, amongst other things.
Anyone else use this kind of setup?

I have sports tracker running on my nokia with polar bluetooth hrm. Didn’t work when phone was in backpack for me. Wear my phone on my arm or in a front pocket.

bluetooth frequencies get blocked by water. human body is mostly water.

Blackberry 9800 Torch
Polar Bluetooth HRM
Endomondo Pro

Easy set up, BB is in top pocket of camelback to get best GPS signal, HRM signal no issues. Can even play music (off road) at the same time.
Battery life does suffer though!

Jambo – that’s what I was worried about. Interesting its worked for one person though. Price is a bit much for “it might work” risk.

Polar bluetooth hrm, endomondo, htc desire.

phone in jersey pocket, has worked fine every time so far (maybe 150 odd uses over 9/10 months)

WTF Jambo?
never ever had a problem in years of using bluetooth headphones to listen to music from my phone while riding.
my body’s mostly lard and beer tho. 😉

bluetooth frequencies get blocked by water. human body is mostly water.

Nothing to stop you wearing the operational part of the HRM on your back instead of your chest.

GW – fairly decent line of sight from ears to bag though isn’t there? Better than passing directly through the body.
Hmmm HRM’s still work pretty well on your back? wonder if its uncomfortable with it pushed against the backpack. ah and the water bladder in the way…

Bluetooth is 2.4ghz, same as wifi. So the thing about the frequencies meaning it won’t work is rubbish. We do bluetooth at work with body mounted kit, where at times the person’s body and the bluetooth gear is facing away from us, and there are two great big electric motors between them and the receiver, and it works fine (about 6 or 7 metres between transmitter and receiver)

It might not work because some bluetooth transmitters are pretty low power, and some receivers have pretty poor aerials though.

Personally I’d be surprised if it didn’t work, although old Polar stuff always used to use very low powered transmitters to improve battery life. There are a bunch of HRMs that work with Android phones that might be better.

Joe

dirtbiker – the blue tooth reciever isn’t anywhere near my ears, it’s clipped to my chest (so the controls are easily reached) phone is sometimes in my pocket, sometimes in a camelback and sometrimes a frame mount bag. I can walk a good 10m away from the phone and still listen to it fine.