PSA for Garmin Forerunner 305 with the Foot Pod

I picked up the Garmin foot pod earlier this year to work on my run cadence. 

For the most part it worked great and I managed to increase my cadence from around 82 to 90.

BUT, I found that there would be periodic dropouts during every run where the cadence would be cut in half - i.e. it would read at 88 to 90 and then drop suddenly to 44 or 45 for brief periods. 

This was fine to track cadence while I was running as all I had to do was double the number when it dropped , but it was useless to track average cadence for the workout.

I tried replacing the battery but it didn't fix the problem.

I finally decided to look into this and found that others had the same problem and all limited to the Forerunner 305, specifically with the most current firmware update - version 2.90.  Apparently the food pod works fine with the 310 and the 910.

The fix for the 305 is to downgrade the firmware to version 2.80 which (so far, so good) has worked for me.  Three runs on the new firmware and not one cadence dropout.  

The link to firmware version 2.80 is below and included in the download is a text file with instructions on how to upload the file.

http://www.gawisp.com/perry/forerunner/Forerunner305_280.exe

A caution that you need to download your workout history before the update as it will wipe your memory including all presets - i.e. auto-lap, auto-pause, workouts, etc.