Carrying a cell phone while diving

[Mayor]

My BB Storm spent 30 min in the hot tub last week. Now I use my old phone and the BB as a door stop. If you have to dive with one get the insurance.

 

[highdesert]

i could text my buddy: "omg shrk bhnd u totlly cool omg"

 

[Rick Inman]

Not a "practice" per se, but I've realized I had my blackberry in the pocket of my drysuit undergarment several times while on the bottom. Weird when it starts to beep or vibrate at 130' issuing a calendar reminder or something.

Yeah that happened to me a few years back. I was coming up the long slope to shore at Edmund's Park, and I didn't realize I had my cell in my chest pocket, and it started to vibrate. I though I was having a heart attack! No pressure issue inside a drysuit.

 

[diver 85]

Personally, I've got more important things to think of than 'where's my cell'...

 

[piffle]

My thoughts exactly.

 

[TSandM]

I know someone who uses an old can light canister to hold a variety of safety gear, and I believe that includes a cell phone. He had had the experience of being swept away from a boat in Puget Sound currents (and made it through a long swim to land) so he carries the extra canister on his harness for any boat dive.

 

[MXGratefulDiver]

Yeah that happened to me a few years back. I was coming up the long slope to shore at Edmund's Park, and I didn't realize I had my cell in my chest pocket, and it started to vibrate. I though I was having a heart attack! No pressure issue inside a drysuit.

LOL ... the same thing happened to me once. I forgot it was in my undergarment pocket until we started the dive (I could feel it once the suit started to squeeze a bit). At the end of the dive ... during the safety stop ... I got a call ... :shocked2:

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

 

[Glock Diver]

The first reply mentioned the Spot Finder, which I had never heard of... sounds like an even better alternative to a cell phone for emergency purposes, although you can't give any details with the Spot Finder, just "I need help, my GPS location is:___"

From their website, www.findmespot.com , it looks like the service costs $99/year.

 

[gene02]

Hey thanks for the tip on SPOT, I will look into that further. I don't know that it will be a lot of help diving but looks really good for traveling with family especially out west where cell coverage really does have a LOT of room for improvement. Would be nice to have on private boat, commercial boats I think by law has to have emergency response beacons for coast guard.

 

[Doc]

The first reply mentioned the Spot Finder

or a ? There are versions suited for deep immersion.

Anyplace where you can get lost (and it is "not your fault") while diving - they don't have cell phone service there, anyway. Darwin in action.

We see these threads once every 45 days. If you did get service... What are you going to do with a cell phone, anyway? If it has GPS, that might be something you could tell the person on the other end- otherwise, what was it that you were going to chat about? Program the boat captain's number in before you back-roll.

I wonder when that will become part of the pre-dive briefing?

I tested common cell phones for military applications a number of years ago- we found NONE of them got any signal when their antennas were submerged. That 30' deep signal access that Sohnje found above is a new one on me.

The signal strength (ERP) of any similar antenna at water level is severely limited. (As in- let me get to a "high spot", aka: HAAT) This pretty well explains why this pie-in-the-sky application really should not (yet) be relied upon: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_radiated_power

The continuing reliance upon technical and electronic methods for not becoming separated, surface signaling and recovery... it causes the real solutions to these issues to be glossed over or ignored. The search for these solutions should be undertaken after the non-battery powered options are fully mastered. This goes beyond buying an SMB and wearing it on the BC as an ornament.

"Machines will fail." -Burt Reynolds in Deliverance