Any complaints? What about the battery life?
I think I have pretty much covered it in the H3 thread. I did 16 dives (8 days) over the first 2 weeks of June. 4 days on wrecks in NC. 4 days on wrecks in the Saint Lawrence River. Some NDL dives. Some deco dives.
The battery seemed to go at least 2 days of diving before it hit the Yellow on the meter. It's supposed to go quite a bit longer on Yellow than it did on Green. So, I could probably have done at least 4 days of diving before I ended a day with the battery in the Red. But, I don't know because I ended up just going ahead and charging it if it ended the day in the Yellow. So, every 2 or 3 days.
My only major complaints are:
- dive log does not include gas info. When you download the dives to Subsurface or whatever the dives don't show what gas you were breathing or if you did a gas switch. I checked the CSV files that come from the H3 and the data is simply not there. It's definitely an issue with the H3 and not, for example, Subsurface.
- gas list does not have a way to "disable" a gas (like the Shearwater Petrel does). So, if you do a dive with a deco gas and then follow it with a dive with no deco gas, you have to delete the deco gas from the computer. Otherwise, the computer will constantly prompt you to switch to your deco gas once you ascend to the right depth. For that matter, it even prompts to switch when you are ascending from the surface at the start! And it will display the wrong TTS, since it's assuming you will switch to the programmed deco gas for accelerated deco. And if you delete the deco gas, then you just have to add it back in before your next deco dive - which is not hard, but it would be a lot less button pushing if you could just enter the deco gas once and then enable/disable it.
- you cannot set your intended final stop depth. The computer assumes a final stop of 10' and calculates your ascent profile based on that. That means the TTS it reports is wrong (if you plan to do your final deco at some deeper depth, like 20' or 30').
- the battery goes from fully charged to dead in 2 to 3 weeks if you leave it just sitting with the Auto Dive Detection option turned on. Don't put it away after a dive trip and then go diving again 3 weeks later and forget to charge it before you go.
- the screen can be hard to read in bright sunlight. Especially on the surface, but even sometimes in shallow (20 - 30 feet) water.
None of those are a huge deal to me. The difference between the displayed TTS and the actual, when you do your final stop deeper than 10' is pretty small, so that's not a big deal. Hopefully, ScubaPro will address the first 4 points in a firmware update. I don't know that there's anything they can do to make it more readable in bright sunlight.
