I got in the pool yesterday with my H3. 85 minutes of "dive" time which it logged as 6 separate dives. It logs separate CSV files for each dive which you can load into Subsurface by connecting the H3 to your computer via the USB cable, putting it in PC Mode, and then just doing an "Import log files" in Subsurface and navigating to the SeaBear drive on your Windows or Mac computer. My observations:
- The screen is totally easy to read underwater (in a pool). I had the Brightness on the default of 7. I think I could be very happy with it turned down to 5 or lower, but that will have to wait until I'm out on a brightly lit day to confirm.
- I didn't notice any screen jumpiness or jitteriness or whatever. A guy I talked to at Cave Adventurers said he noticed that out of the corner of his eye when he moved his arm around in his field of vision. He described as being sort of like watching motion on a TV with a not-high-enough refresh rate. Like I said, I didn't notice anything like that and I'm not sure how OLED display technology would give that kind of appearance?
- I didn't have any issues with button feel. I could push them and find them more easily than with my Petrel. Of course, I was not wearing gloves. The buttons are stiff. Like they have pretty strong springs under 'em. Not a problem. They feel stiffer than necessary, but maybe that's on purpose to help prevent accidental presses.
- I am 6'1" and 225 #, but I have wrists that I think are a bit on the skinny side for my size. Certainly not big, anyway. The stock strap fit around my wrist, over my 3/2 wetsuit, with very little slack to spare. Good thing it came with a strap extender. I didn't need it with my 3/2, but I for sure will with my 7/5 suit.
- I charged the H3 fully on Thursday or Friday. I used it for 84 minutes of dive time on Sunday. I turned it on today to download dives and the battery icon was yellow with only 2 of 3 segments "lit". That seems very short considering it's suppose to get 15 hours dive time per charge. Hopefully that is just a matter of needing a few charge/discharge cycles.
- The menu navigation can be annoying because just about any setting you change or any submenu you enter, when you leave it takes you back to the dive screen, instead of the previous menu. When you're going through and doing an initial setup, this is a serious pain. Once you have it setup and you're just changing conservatism or editing gases, I don't think it would be such a big deal. Still, it would be nice if they changed it so entering a setting took you back to the previous menu and added a long press option for Exit on a lot of the screens to let you go back to the dive screen if you want.
- There is nowhere that I can find in the UI that will show you the total amount of dive time the computer has been used for. You can only see the total number of dives by entering the Logbook and seeing the dive number of the dive that is displayed (which is the most recent).
- In my Logbook, I can see dives 1, 3, 4, 5, and 6. It does not display dive 2. When I look at the CSV files, dive 2 only has 1 data point. It shows in Subsurface as a dive that only went to 5' and lasted for 5 seconds. Dive 3 is logged in the CSV file as starting 1 second after dive 2 and is 20 minutes long. So, for some reason, the H3 started a CSV file for dive 2, then immediately ended it and started dive 3.
- The dive end time setting (i.e. the amount of time that can elapse before the H3 decides the current dive has ended) is defaulted to 1 minute and the maximum is 5 minutes. I would like it if I could make it at least 10 minutes. That would cover about 90% of the times I've been doing training where I consider it to be one dive, but we had trips to the surface to talk before resuming the dive. Not an issue at all, I don't think, outside of training scenarios.
- The H3 assumes a last stop depth (for deco) of 10'. This is not anything I encountered in the pool yesterday. But, I would definitely like it better if it gave options for 10, 20, or 30' for the last stop.
- When you configure gases, there is no way to leave a gas configured but marked as Disabled. The Petrel has this and I think it's a nice feature. On the H3, if you want to do what-if scenarios, you have to actually delete a gas and then manually add it back if you decide you want it. It would be nicer to just disable and re-enable gases. Especially since the way the H3 provides to edit #s is not like the Petrel where you edit individual digits. On the H3, you get to the number field and then use short presses on the buttons to increment and decrement. This means you can have a lot of presses if you are going from Air to O2. And you can't press and hold for quick scrolling because a long press will mean something else (generally Save or Exit). So, you are forced to just do a bunch of short button presses. I don't like the way the Petrel distinguishes gases (active, versus available, versus disabled). The H3 could one-up Shearwater here by allowing you to disable gases and displaying disabled gases in a more intuitive way, for example, using a strikethrough on the line of the disabled gas. Shearwater, IIRC, uses bold for Active, and negative font (meaning black letter on white or purple background) for disabled, or something like that. None of that is intuitive regarding which gas is active versus disabled. OTOH, a strikethrough of all the letters and numbers on a disabled gas would be very intuitive to understand, I think.
- The Dive Simulation tool is pretty cool, but I'm not sure how useful it really is in the real world yet. But, it would be nicer to use if it let you configure multiple levels before you start the simulation. As it is, you configure the first level and start it, when that level is done, you can add a level and continue the simulation. Also, if you are playing what-if, and you run a simulation, then want to run it again but, say, with a slightly different run time, you have to reconfigure the whole thing. It would be nicer if it remembered your last simulation and let you modify it to run again.
- The simulation actually runs at 10x speed. So, simulating a 10 minute dive takes 1 minute. If you want to simulate your ascent, you have to put in levels for that - or at least a final level of 0 and set it for at least enough time to make your ascent from the previous depth. It does not automatically simulate deco stops. So, if you simulate a dive to 200' for 10 minutes and you want to simulate a real ascent with stops, you have to enter each deco stop as a level, including the time to ascend to that depth plus the time you spend hanging there. When it runs, as it simulates ascending, it will prompt for a gas switch at each appropriate depth based on the gases you have configured. During the simulation, you have to hit the button to accept the suggested gas or you can choose to have it continue as if you are staying on whatever gas you're already using.
- Also, the Dive Simulation really needs a way to give it a start time, so that you can simulate a dive based on starting say "1 hour from now". It runs the simulation based on whatever the current tissue loading information it has is. So, you can use it to see what you can do if you get in right now. But, there's no way to simulate "I sit out for 1 more hour from now then do 100' for 10 minutes."
- The menu for setting current time is a bit weird. If you go to set time, it lets you set the time and the time zone offset. But then there is a separate entry in the Settings menu for Time Zone 1 - and another for Time Zone 2. From what I can tell, the time zone setting in the Time screen is simply redundant to the time zone setting in the Time Zone 1 screen.
All in all, I really like he H3 and now definitely plan to sell my Petrel 2. It would be nice to have redundant tech computers, but that's not in the current budget, so my Rec computer in gauge mode will have to be my backup.
The strap on the H3 feels very heavy duty. And it's made with 2 accordion-like sections, so you can stretch it over your wetsuit and it will tighten up to prevent it flopping around as you descend and your wetsuit compresses. But, the strap still has the liability that if a strap pin or the buckle pin breaks the whole computer will fall off your arm. Between that and how short it is, I think I will be ordering a NATO G10 strap to replace it with. The G10 Drysuit strap is long enough for anything and the rings make for a nice way to tuck the tail away without having it flop around. Tucking the tail that way also makes it where if the strap buckle's pin breaks, you also still have a decent chance of not losing the computer altogether. I have one of those straps on my Atom and it works well over my drysuit and over my 3/2 wetsuit.
