Question Suunto Eon Steel Black Safety Stop

[ZephyrNYC]

No. You did chose well.

The Eon Steel is one of the best beginner diving computers in my eyes. It has a big, bright colourful screen and is easy to handle with big buttons. You also get all the telemetry out on your PC or Smartphone so you can analyze after the dive.

There are a few things it can't do very well (e.g. Sidemount), but I will not go into that now.

Most important thing:
Read the manual. Understand all the settings and why you set them in a specific way.

You'll need at least: Altitude, Gas mixture, Algorithm (Suunto or Bühlmann) incl. desired conservationism, tank size, declination (for compass).
I would also configure tank pressure and depth alarm (18m), both audio and visual. That doesn't excuse you from not paying attention, but the computer will get your attention when you are distracted.

Take your time at home and familiarize yourself with how to operate it. Play around and customize the screens in a way that makes sense for you. One thing that I find very helpful is the remaining gas time.
Once you're in the water, it should be muscle memory.

For the ascend procedure:
The computer will tell you the ceiling (if you accidently ran into deco) that you must never ever break. Otherwise it will indicate the voluntary safety stop depth (I believe between 3 to 6m) and the Suunto algorithm will add a semi-mandatory safety stop if you "misbehave" (ascend too fast etc.). It's not "necessary" according to PADI, but do yourself a favour and just wait until everything is clear before you ascend above the safety stop minimum depth. It's for your safety.

There really is no rush to get back to the surface under normal circumstances. Your gas will last "forever" in shallow depth and the slower and more graceful you ascend your final meters, the less stress you put on your body.

Keep in mind that the suunto algorithm also extends the no-fly time beyond the 24h padi recommendation if you dive a lot in a day.
Also the maximum ascend speed according to PADI is 18m/min, which is very fast and the EON steel will yell at you (for good reason in my opinion).

Why isn't it good for sidemount? Sorry, I haven't taken a sidemount class yet. Which computers would you recommend to a beginner sidemount, nitrox, trimix diver?

 

[Pearlman]

Tl;Dr: The Eon is extremely sensitive to small changes when ascending. As in raising your hand fast is enough to get penalised. And make your safety stop mandatory as mentioned above.

It seems that the Eon measures ascent speed in really small slices. Every continuous thing such as ascent has to be measured in slices to determine if going too fast. While most computers seem to measure in large enough slices that random movements average out to be fine, the Eon seems to consider a quick rise of 30 cm to be a violation.

This is all good and fine, until tou realise raising your hand, or even unspooling the SMB can raise it above 30 cm.

When such a thing happens, it defaults to requiring the user to stay a bit below 6 metres for a little while before ascending to the safety stop, shown by a red blinking down arrow IIRC.

There's no setting to adjust that as far as I could find, and adjusting the profile to be less conservative is a really bad solution. So just avoid raising your hand really quick, as it's a phenomenal computer otherwise for someone doing mostly rec dives.

This seems to be it. I have almost 100 dives on my Eon Core and have been left bewildered at how bad I was at managing my ascent rate … (my ego took a hit at times when I thought I had been managing my depth and ascent towards the end fairly well LOL).

I don’t know if the Fused RGBM bubble model requires accounting for such tiny ascent rate “violations” in order to be a valid model … I wish the Eon Core would allow the Buhlmann ZHL-16 algorithm on it. The Eon Steel model AFAIK has allowed switching algorithms since a few years now with a firmware update - the OP should try switching from FRGBM to Buhlmann-16 and observe behaviour on future dives …