945 first week thoughts

Forgot to mention one quirk. 

My whr LEDs stay on when connected to external HRM.

This must be a big and needlessly wastes battery.

overall I have found battery life to be a little less than the 935.

Agree with your assessment. Worth the upgrade. Most capable Garmin device currently available. I do notice that using the Pulse Ox does really kill the battery though. Set it to use while sleeping last night and it drained 30% of my battery overnight.

It's interesting to see people saying the "GPS has been flawless". It's known that the new SONY chipset used in this watch is not so great (yet!), for the purpose of saving battery. I've been comparing the GPS accuracy of my 945 with previous watches I've owned: Fenix 3, 920xt, 935 and a very old 410. ALL the watches mentioned have, on average, a superior GPS accuracy, especially when you zoom in compare the details. The 945 tracking is super rough. 

But this is "fixable". I'm sure Garmin will keep updating its firmware and we will definitely see improvements in the future.

I'm overall pleased with the GPS I'm getting from the 945. I've had some runs on my normal route that are better than the 645 or F5S+ got on average but I haven't any that are as bad as the worst I've gotten from older watches. Of course the sample size isn't nearly as large either.

Yesterdays run was a little wonky but only in the sense that in some places the track was "right" but shifted a bit to the North East. That was in a park that I've only run with the 945 so I have no reference to how the older chipset works in that area.

This past weekend I ran on a rail-trail that only has a few open areas and the rest has varying degrees of tree cover from complete coverage to an alley between 2 rows of tall trees. It was a straight out and back and the track was better than any other I've gotten from past watches on that trail.

I think people are reading too much into the fact that there's a new chip that hasn't done great in other company's products. If the change in GPS chipset hadn't been announced I wouldn't have noticed it.

More than what the track "looks like", although it's related of course, what really matters for runners is the consistency of 1km (or 1mile) laps when you're out on a run. The F5 was terrible for that compared to my old FR610 and FR235 with swings from one lap to the other and from one day to the other. Very confusing when you're trying to keep a steady pace (say for marathon training). I sent it back and got the FR935 and it's been fine (with the small usual acceptable variation) since, except under thick tree cover but that's unavoidable.

Where are the reports of mediocre GPS accuracy? Ray (dcrainmaker) rated it highly in his review and and my (admittedly so limited) experience with it so far have been really positive.

With 3 runs (about 50Kmts) , i have the "same" or very similar as i get with the 920XT.  Open sky views in general. Im still missing the old FR405.

Not a bug it's because you have Pulse Ox on.