Krzysztof do you own the T6c? Or asking questions before its purchase?

As to your questions:
Q: How many PODs may be paired and working at the same time with t6c monitor? Is there any limit?

A: You can pair number of pods and belts with the T6c. I have HR belt, memory belt, road bike pod, foot pod and GPS pod paired with the watch. Only one HR belt and one speed/distance pod will be active at a time. And on bike you may also have the cadence pod active.

Q: Has someone tried to use Foot POD to measure cadence while GPS POD to measure speed and distance at the same time?

A: This is not possible with Suunto T6c. Only one speed/distance pod will hook up with the watch and provide speed/distance. Only Garmin 405 and Polar RS800cx can utilize two sources of information. They each do it differently - Garmin takes speed/distance from GPS (but I have been told that they updated firmware and you can take now pace from foot pod - never had opportunity to test this thoug). The foot pod on 405 is used for run cadence info. Polar on the other hand takes speed/pace and distance from foot pod and captures GPS location from GPS G3 pod.

Q: Has someone tried to use Foot POD to measure step lenght while GPS POD to measure speed and distance at the same time?

A: The Suunto foot pod does not measure the stride length (to my knowledge only Polar S3 foot pod does this). GPS pod can not measure stride length in any case as it has no informration about how many steps you did.

Q: Using Foot POD and GPS  POD in above way be benefitial in terms of devices  needed.

I'm not sure what you mean by this. But quite frankly the cadence for running is only useful for the time when you are working on your cadence. It took me about 3-4 months to change my cadence and running stride. Now I can run with any HRM and still run at cadence of 90+. As for the stride length - I never really looked at it other than an interesting data - I know that my stride is longer the faster I run (kind of makes sense since my cadence increases only a little when I pickup the pace).

As for using GPS pod for recording location I still don't get what should be so exciting about it. I have the G3 with my Polar, but only use it in running races or on some sessions. Definitely not a must have for training watch at least for my needs.

Well T6c does not have a compass and the alti/baro function was removed from the original T6 models (now only altitude is built in and needs frequent calibration as any altitude based system).

Did you mean to look at the X10 that has the compass, GPS navigation? But it does not have the HR and EPOC/TE. There is really no watch that does it all. You will need to look at your preferences.

As for Polar and Garmin - take a look at the new 310 from Garmin that is supposed to have much longer battery and in Polar stable the RS800cx comes closest to what you described (except compass).

Regardless of which one you chose at least the T6c and RS800cx are great training tools (no one really knows how the 310 turns out it has yet to be released). I own both and quite often have hard time to decide which one to take with me to train with. For daily wearing I prefer T6c in black as it still looks like a normal watch. RS800cx screams at everyone - look I'm a training watch, but it is also the smallest and lightest of all three so I usually take it for longer trips when I take only one of the watches with me. They all have their pluses and minuses. Believe me I tried a lot of different HRMs before I settled on T6c and RS800cx.

One of the benefits of both is that you can get EPOC/TE from both. T6c has it during the exercise while RS800cx only after the session if you use FB Athlete.


Edited by kxux - 16 Apr 2009 at 07:24