It's not cost that prevents me from tech diving. It's that I'm not a daredevil or an extreme sports man. I just like looking at the pretty fishes and corals in warm water at depths where there's still lots of light. I've read The Last Dive and Deep Descent. I love reading about it, but I have no interest in doing it.You're right, you'll probably never be a tech diver...that's an expensive route....$85 will seem like a drop in the bucket....
I don't do deco diving, but I'd love to see a spreadsheet that calculates multi-level no-stop dive plans. I was under the impression that the calculations were extremely complicated.I just use an Excel spreadsheet: one page for SAC calculations, a second for air consumption for the planned profile. The calculations are not hard and it's a nice exercise in dive planning to do it yourself.
If your needs change you can add NDL's, pO2's, OTU's, %CNS, EAD's, run times, best mix, rock bottoms, which tanks fit the profile, etc. ad nausea ... At the moment I'm mulling over the best way to add deco stop displays to the sheet.
Cheers,
Rohan.
I do use a computer, and the computer tells me when to come up. And I can use the tables (air or nitrox) to plan repetitive square-profile dives. But I'd like to be able to plan multi-level dives, rather than just riding the computer.Most computers have built in dive planners that provide the max time at depth based on previous dives logged. IOW's if you are diving, it takes into account nitrogen loading from your previous dives.
Planning a dive is important, but I think you will find if you do NDL at a given depth, and ascend VERY slowly, there is really no other planning necessary. Flat bottoms, and square profiles are easy to plan, but multilevel dive planning is not much harder. I use nitrox to extend BT on flatter profiles. On shallower reef dives where the max depth is maybe 40' the BT is generally limited by the boat assuming you are boat diving.
Initially dive planning seems like it would require some advanced calculations, but the reality is that it is not that hard. One is generally limited by NDL (deeper dives), or the captain (boat dives), or air.
Hlplanner only runs on Windows. As noted above, when traveling I use a Linux computer.I currently use GAP and am switching to V-planner you won't like the price of GAP if you are hem and hawing over a few dollars for V-Planner. You might want to take a look at hlplanner.com for a free software program download that is very sweet in my opinion for planning as well as checking your table dive profiles and gas planning.
Again, I'd spend money for a serious dive-safety tool. I don't care to spend money on a toy, and for now, I want to play around with dive-planning software. Maybe I'll just play with vplanner for the 30-day trial period. But that program is overkill for me, with its mixed gasses and deco stops.