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I'm not following. You need more than the spool to change the spool, like two wrenches. Are they in your Wetnotes too? I'd much rather change the battery on a PPS transmitter than change a spool. But, just like checking an isolator before diving, don't you check battery conditions on your computer and your lights? Why not on your transmitter, too?
Unlike most of the people here, she cave dives something like every day using the gear she wrote about. I'd listen to her before I would most of the people here, at least if we're talking specifically about sidemount cave diving (which I believe you aren't interested in anyway if I have been following the conversation). There is clearly some bias in the article, but so long as her self-interests are known--she's a Shearwater dealer, and as Richard said it's possible she was even paid for the article--we can take that into account in weighing her opinions.
Yep, some first stages don’t allow a transmitter to screw on directly. I swapped out mine for ones with an accessible hp port so that i could. One of my rebreathers has a nerd controller. I haven’t had issue with it losing connection. My back mount unit doesn’t have a nerd, but i could definitely see it having a connection issue due to distance if it did. It has no issue keeping synch with a wrist mount perdix.
We are not communicating. You said you had a spool in your Wetnotes. That implied to me you were intending to change your spool on the spot, perhaps on the steps, while wet. So I asked if you had wrenches in your wet notes too. I guess what you meant was you were still ashore, not in the water, and had all your tools available to you. In that case, how did you know your spool was leaking, and what difference does it make where you store your spare spool?
That was my biggest annoyance. On the fathom (in sm bailout configuration) I had to install the transmitter on a hose that hangs between the can and the oxygen tank because I'm unable to directly screw it in. The large adjustable opv on the reg gets in the way on the apeks regs and you can't screw them both in. Its an annoyance because it's adding failure points. On my wife's in bm config, we can direct thread
It's a huge annoyance. It never shows itself until you're in the water. I had a horrible 18 months of diving last year and the year prior. Almost every dive I'd either have a hose leak, a reg lose ip, a hp hose failure, a spool failure, or a valve handle leak. It got to the point I would drive up to dive and just get so annoyed I'd go home or do something else. It was a rough year. It happened so often I really questioned why the hell I just didn't dive in a single al80 with a jacket bc or quit diving entirely.
