GPS watches can significantly enhance your fitness training. By accurately pinpointing your precise location on Earth, these watches measure your distance traveled, instantaneous speed, your route on a map, elevation above sea level, vertical speed and many more advanced features that are beyond the capabilities of normal sports watches.
While most GPS watches are designed to help running, cycling, triathlon and other motion sports improve their fitness and performance, others are built with tracking and navigation in mind. Some models like the Garmin Forerunner 305 can do both.
So let's look at the sort of features, offered in navigation watches.
Navigation watches allow you to mark locations or "waypoints". These can either be single waypoints or a collection, commonly called a "route". At any point you can activate a waypoint and your watch will guide you to it. Most of these sort of watches also allow you to backtrack to your starting location, ensuring you never get lost.
Models like the Forerunner 305 and Globalsat GH-625B feature a large screen, allowing you to view your course on a top-down 2D map. The watch allows you to enter custom markers along a route and will point you in the direction of your next waypoint.
A compass feature is another common navigation feature, it presents your facing with respect to true north, but can only show you your direction when you are in motion. When you are stationary it cannot calculate this information from the satellite signals.
Watches like Sunnto's X9i and X10 take navigation a step further and calculate your ETA at the next waypoint based on your current speed. These watches feature an accurate barometric altimeter which offers a more precise measure of altitude than a standard GPS system is capable of.
Here is a list of popular GPS watches that have navigation capabilities:
Globalsat GH-625B, GH-625M, GH-615B, GH-615M
Garmin Forerunner 405, 305, 205, 301, 201, 101
Timex Ironman Bodylink Trail Runner T5J985
Suunto X9/i, X9M/i, X10
More information about navigation GPS watches can be found on our website.
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Price : $169.50
