This is not meant to be a comprehensive product review.  Instead it is an evaluation of two products to figure out which one is the best for my specific needs.

Those needs are:

• Record stroke by stroke data from the erg
• Support PM5 (required), PM4 and PM3 (bonus)
• Works with iphone
• No physical connection required to phone (because I use headphones and wear the phone on my bet when I row * )
• Works with other apps running including wahoo fitness, stitcher, spotify, etc
• Works with wahoo tikr HR strap
• provides CSV output for post processing (required)

* Note:  Before you ask, I have tried wireless ear buds and none of them stay in my ears, and all of them are incredibly fiddly.  Maybe someday cheap, reliable BT earbuds will be available that I can screw securely into my ears.  Until then, the phone stays on the hip.

I was going to originally include PainSled in the evaluation, but I am still working through some Beta issues with the developer.  As soon as I have something useful to say, I’ll write that one up too.

First up.  Ergstick.  Check out their website.  It is a USB dongle that is sold for $120.  This is what it looks like.

You jam the green thingy into the back of your PM5, or the bottom of your PM3.  I haven’t  tried it with the PM3, but I plan to tomorrow.

Then you fire up the app and I made a horrifying discovery.  To get the single most important feature that I wanted from the software (CSV exports), I needed to pony up for “ErgStick Pro” to the tune of $39.99.  And this did not buy the pro version, it gives a one year subscription to the pro version.  So the cost of ergstick is $120+$40 initially, plus $40 per year.  Wow! Ouch!  On top of that, I can find nothing about this on their website.  The only place where it is defined is in the description of the app in the apple app store.

OK, well I’ve come this far.  Next step is to try it out.  I paid my money (in for a penny, in for a pound) and upgraded.  The app synched right away with the dongle and provided a live screen with nifty data that I don’t look at.

I programmed the PM5 for a time interval session (10′ with 0:00 rest), and off I went.  When I finished, I pushed menu to terminate the workout and checked out my phone.  Here are the cool screen you get.

Pretty nice displays.  On the Heart Rate, Pace and Stroke Rate screen, the cursor should have been showing the values.  For some reason it didn’t in the interval session.  It did for this simple 100m test session that I did without a HR sensor.

Getting CSV was not as convenient as some other apps, which allow you to ship to dropbox or sync multiple files automatically.  In this app you need to email each file individually.  A pain, but workable.  From there it was simple to modify my ergdata spreadsheet to deal with the ergstick format data.

ergstick provides 4 to 6 records per stroke, and a huge number of data fields in the CSV.

Total elapsed time (s)

Total distance (m)

Stroke rate (/min)

Speed (m/s)

Current heart rate (bpm)

Stroke count

Stroke power

Stroke calories (cal/hr)

Projected work time (s)

Projected work distance (m)

Split/interval time (s)

Split/interval distance (m)

Split/interval rest time (s)

Split/interval rest distance (s)

Split/interval type

Split/interval number

Split/interval ave. stroke rate (/min)

Split/interval ave. pace (/500m)

Split/interval total calories (cals)

Split/interval average calories (cal/hr)

Split/interval speed (m/s)

Split/interval power

Split/interval ave. drag factor

OK, so on to ergdata.  With the PM5, it’s just the same except it doesn’t cost anything. I started ergdata on my phone, and it immediately synched up with the PM5.  I programmed the same 10’/0 rest interval session on the PM5 and did another L4 steady state session.

After I finished, I pressed menu on the PM5 to terminate the session and checked my phone.  Here are the key screens.

On the logBook screen you can push the sync button and like magic, the session appears in your concept2 online logbook.

Then you can push the little magnifying glass to dive into the workout.  And then this is what you see.  I’ve heard through the grapevine that HR data will be added to the graphs and summaries soon.  The graphs show the selected interval.  There is no choice of units or ability to show the whole workout.  There are apparently some glitches in the way that it calculates pace for interval workouts with rest meters in them.  I assume for ranking distances that they have tested the crap out of it, but if you should check the numbers if you care a lot.

You can see over on the right side, at the bottom there is an option to export stroke data.  This is a much less sophisticated data set than ergstick, but it has all the basics with a single record per stroke.

Stroke Number

Time (seconds)

Distance (meters)

Pace (seconds per 500m)

Stroke Rate

Heart Rate

This was easy to massage into excel.  So easy in fact, that I decided to add a watts graph to the collection.

So, from my perspective, there is a clear winner.  Ergdata is much, much cheaper, and it provides automatic synching with the concept2 log book.  If you have a PM3 or PM4 and you are thinking of buying an ergstick, I suggest a PM5 upgrade instead because the cost will less after the second year.

There is a specific group of people that I think will prefer the ergstick.  If you are on a team or have a common practice facility with a large number of ergs that have PM4 or PM3 and you want to get workout data in a consistent format, then ergstick will be a very good solution.   It will let you use any erg and get the data you need.  But it is pretty darn expensive.