Buying my first Dive Computer need a little help

[stuartv]

Hey Stuart. I suspect its because with tables, the whole dive was at max depth. I used to get out, check the time and the indicator needle on my depth gauge and use that to work out my repetitive dive times. Since none of my dives were ever square profile, almost always ascending during the dive, I for one was a LOT more conservative then than I am now where I actually end up riding the NDL.

I know a lot of divers that get to NDL-1 then ascend a little up the reef and repeat till gas gone or surfaced. While that is not unsafe as far as Im concerned, it is definitely more aggressive than if you calculated the same dive on regular tables.

That makes perfect sense. Thanks.

 

[KeithG]

Since all the recreational computers are, I believe, more conservative than the PADI RDP tables, why do you imply that people riding the NDL on their computers is being more aggressive than how people behaved "back then"?

"back then"we had had square profile tables and people used them to dive multi level profiles (well some did). As vacation divers we understood that we really were not at the NDL limit as we spent the second half of each dive at half the depth (standard vacation diver profile).

We dived to the very edge of the tables. We were a teeny tiny bit concerned, but not much since we knew we where doing multi level dives (but were not technical enough to properly understand the details). Then we got a dive computer. We were no where near the NDL.

So we stayed longer and deeper than we used to (since we had lots of air)...

We still dive very conservatively, but routinely see people diving the edge of their computer's NDL..