Garmin MK2i
- Thread starter Dody
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DXHI
Contributor
Can the in reach work as a stand alone unit .. ie if I went with another computer
Belzelbub
Contributor
Yes. No need to control it with a Garmin watch. It’s just a perk.
I recently picked up a MK2S. The MK2 and MK2i were just too big for me to wear on a daily basis. The G1 and MK2S are a bit more watch sized. I picked it up at a decent discount. I wanted a Smart/Activity watch, and also wanted a backup to my Perdix AI. So far, I’m pretty happy with it. UI is not quite as intuitive as my Shearwater, but pretty good. Didn’t take long to get used to it.
I haven’t used it to dive just yet. Plan was for that to happen today, but the waves offshore didn’t cooperate. I charged it early on Sunday, and it’s currently just under 60%. I wore it every day, but not at night. Turned it off at night. So far, no complaints. Yes, it doesn’t allow me to respond to texts from the watch, but I can’t see myself doing that anyway. I can read them, and decide if I should respond or if it can wait.
Should work just fine as a backup. Uses the same algorithm as my Perdix, but doesn’t have AI. Not a huge problem as it’s a backup.
TuckerIdaho
Contributor
nm
scubaozy
Contributor
I think there are 2 modes for HR, 1 measures actual HR and I doubt this can be measured over any dry/wet suit, so you need to pull your arm seals up and make space over your skin and then it will work. 2. It will extrapolate, probably based on your history it will try to estimate some made up values.
One thing that bothers me is that O2 is not monitored during diving, so, it would have been nice.
I do happen to find a way to do exactly that: just don't sync with your phone and use your computer without their software to read the watch as a disk. Then you can have your diving/ training data as .fit files. There are open source softwares to transcribe them to human readable formats, but needs some search on Github.Depends on if I can figure out how to block the data upload to Garmin. They freely admit to selling your collected data in their privacy policy (just like every other company out there anymore). That pisses me off, especially with a device I paid them $1500 for. If I can't do that then it will be relegated to whatever I can use off the watch directly, and Subsurface upload for dive logs. It does have a lot of cool stuff on it though!
I don't think it will be too hard to detect and block. That's one of the things I do for a living.
Garmin doesn't sell your personal data.Depends on if I can figure out how to block the data upload to Garmin. They freely admit to selling your collected data in their privacy policy (just like every other company out there anymore). That pisses me off, especially with a device I paid them $1500 for. If I can't do that then it will be relegated to whatever I can use off the watch directly, and Subsurface upload for dive logs. It does have a lot of cool stuff on it though!
I don't think it will be too hard to detect and block. That's one of the things I do for a living.
Garmin watches aren't capable of extrapolating heart rate. That's not how they work. The wrist optical sensor is incapable of detecting heart rate when worn over a wetsuit or drysuit sleeve. If you see it displaying a wrist-based heart rate like that then it's essentially a random number with no relation to your actual heart rate. It's supposed to detect when it's not getting an accurate reading and automatically turn off the sensor but in my experience that doesn't work reliably and sometimes it gives phantom readings. Hold the device up to a piece of neoprene in a dark room and you'll see that no light from the green LEDs passes through. So I always manually disable the wrist sensor when I put on my exposure protection suit in order to prevent spurious readings.
In warm water with a shorty wetsuit you can wear the watch directly on your skin and it should give a reasonably accurate HR as long as the strap is snug. You can also pair it with an external heart rate chest strap like a Garmin HRM-Pro. That won't show real time heart rate during the dive because the radio signals don't penetrate water, but the watch will download the stored heart rate when you end the dive and return to the surface. Those chest straps have limited depth rating so I wouldn't take it on a deep dive under a wetsuit, but I've taken mine to about 200 ft under a drysuit and it still works.
As for the oxygen sensor, it's only designed to detect hypoxia due to sleep apnea or mountain climbing. Wouldn't be useful underwater where we have near 100% hemoglobin saturation plus additional free oxygen dissolved in the blood.
TuckerIdaho
Contributor
Wrist pulse ox would be nearly ineffective underwater but pulse ox elsewhere has been proven effective for detecting hypoxia underwater.
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