Petrel rec mode

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Qasar

Contributor
Messages
91
Reaction score
11
Location
UAE
# of dives
100 - 199
Hi Mr Shearwater, saw your very good educational videos on youtube...
Are there deep stops in rec mode, or the only thing is increasing safety stops to 5mn?
Please, the purpose is not to start a new discussion on the usefulness of deep stops for rec dives, but if I want to do deep stops will the petrel shows them in rec mode?
 
Hi Qasar,

The words "deep stops" are used in a few different ways.

If you mean "an extra safety stop inserted at around 50ft to 60ft (15m to 18m) during the ascent on a no-deco dive", then unfortunately the answer is no.

Best regards,
Tyler Coen
Shearwater Research

Hi Mr Shearwater, saw your very good educational videos on youtube...
Are there deep stops in rec mode, or the only thing is increasing safety stops to 5mn?
Please, the purpose is not to start a new discussion on the usefulness of deep stops for rec dives, but if I want to do deep stops will the petrel shows them in rec mode?
 
Thank you Tyler. That was exactly my question. May I ask why you decided to do that as this practice is coming from tec dives and PETREL is a tec dive computer originaly. In addition the interest of deep stops is clearly illustrated on a paper on your website (as if it's for tec dives): http://www.shearwater.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Deep-Stops.pdf
I'm diving in an environement where the first decco chamber is 4 hours from the dive spots, so we are very conservative on our dive practice and adding deep stops to rec dives (for 25 to 35m depth dives) is part of our DCS prevention (as if nothing is for sure in this area). So having a choice between the "adapt" mode where the safety stop at 6m is increased to 5mn and another one where the last is always 3mn but with deep stops before should be good for me.

---------- Post added March 27th, 2014 at 12:09 AM ----------

Oh, by the way, why all new computers on the market are in "silent" mode. NO audible alarm. If you are crossing a line, most of the time it's because you don't look at your computer, so only a visible alarm is useless if you don't look at it, does it?
 
If you want a noisy computer there are alternatives. But I have dived with a group of divers who all had their acoustic alarms on, it is impossible to locate the sound under water, so nobody paid attention to the noise after the first few minutes :shakehead:
The first thing I did when I read the manual of my first DC was to turn off any sound.
If you need audible alarms you should try to improve your situational awareness.
 
Well Nribromanski and Agility I intend to disagree with you.
When I'm not diving I'm a fighter pilot, this is a category of people that are supposed to be professional, properly trained and selected to perform difficult tasks in a challenging environment. And guess what, we have visible AND audible alarms in our aircrafts. Is it noisy? Yes. Is it boring sometimes? yes. But we know the ability of human being, as good as they could be, to not looking at the right place at the right moment, and this tendancy is emphasized during stress periods when things are going wrong or when focusing on something else (you see that beautiful fish that I follow below my limit to take a picture?).
So, I understand your confort request, but here we are talking about safety. So please don't advocate for silent computer, but for a possibility to switch the alarm off if you want.
 
When I had my citizen dive watch I would regularly set 2 dive alarms, one for max planned depth + 3 metres and one for max planned dive time to safety stop + 5 minutes. They very rarely went off, time more often than depth. I did not rely on the alarms they were only there as end stops and normally one beep was enough to swicth off.
Diving with a group of divers all with audible alarms going off every few minutes is extremely annoying. The constant beeping of ascent alarms triggered by a diver waving to their buddies to come and look at this or that. For some reason it is worse on a night dive, alarms seem to be a constant background noise with some dive groups.
 
So please don't advocate for silent computer
Maybe we should open a new thread for this.
The current state IMHO is that far too many false (audible) alarms are making this feature useless and therefor annoying in recreational diving. The fact that it is practically impossible to discriminate the alarms of different computers under water leads to ignoring them all, what is left is a lot of noise without any gain in safety. But as I said, if you want a divecomputer with audible alarms there are many available. The sound processor adds to the complexity of the computer and is another (avoidable) energy consumer and point of failure.
My worst experience was diving with a young lady who used a Galileo but needed so little air that her computer was complaining and beeping away throughout all the dives.
over and out
 
IMHO audible alarms are just one more "innovation" that breeds complacency. All diving, not just technical diving, requires that you monitor your "systems" at all times...depth, gas supply, time, personal well-being and so on. If monitoring those systems is too much task loading then the diver should reconsider their choice of sport.
 
Well Nribromanski and Agility I intend to disagree with you.
When I'm not diving I'm a fighter pilot, this is a category of people that are supposed to be professional, properly trained and selected to perform difficult tasks in a challenging environment. And guess what, we have visible AND audible alarms in our aircrafts. Is it noisy? Yes. Is it boring sometimes? yes. But we know the ability of human being, as good as they could be, to not looking at the right place at the right moment, and this tendancy is emphasized during stress periods when things are going wrong or when focusing on something else (you see that beautiful fish that I follow below my limit to take a picture?).
So, I understand your confort request, but here we are talking about safety. So please don't advocate for silent computer, but for a possibility to switch the alarm off if you want.


Far be it from me to argue with a fighter pilot, but I'll respectfully disagree with you.

IMHO, an audible alarm reduces safety, and there are a lot of threads on this subject - bottom line is that they are a crutch which tends to reduce, not enhance situational awareness.. I don't really want to rehash it all here, but you seem to be under the impression that an audible alarms are a safety feature which increase safety but that people disable them for comfort. I do not think that this is correct.

I don't know if you have taken technical training, but if you have you know that they are not typically used in technical diving, and I will guarantee you that one thing that technical diving does not tolerate is cutting corners to decrease safety.

Furthermore - and I'm NOT an expert on this - but I have heard that the reason that deep stops are controversial is that some of your compartments may be actually ongassing during this stop, so while you may be theoretically limiting bubble growth, you are could also be increasing nitrogen loading. If deep stops were unequivocally associated with a lower DCS risk, then it would indeed make sense to consider them a way of increasing conservatism. Unfortunately, all of our models are just that - assumptions about physiology that slowly are honed to reflect observed clinical outcomes. Hard to do real controlled experimental science in this field. So I would assume that Shearwater's decision not to include them in their recreational software isn't just an unfortunate omission.
 

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