Hello!
One of the reasons I bought the Descent is that it has a GPS in it, which I plan to use to mark some shallow dive sites I'd like to be able to return to. (Yes, I completely understand that the GPS doesn't work underwater :-)
I haven't used this thing extensively yet, but I've noticed a few worrisome / annoying things that leads to questions / comments:
1. When in "dive" mode I can't use the maps. Only in apnea mode. So if I've got my computer set up for diving so when I descend it does the right thing and starts a scuba dive, it doesn't seem like it's all that easy to navigate (by swimming) on the surface to a particular spot and then just drop down. Hey, Garmin, when I'm on a surface interval for scuba (ie: I have GPS connectivity) could you please allow me to use the map the same way I can in the apnea modes?
2. In addition to navigating to a known spot, I want to be able to bounce to the surface, mark a spot I'm hovering over, and then descend again. (Please no comments about inadvisable dive profiles - these are shallow dives.) If I get to the surface and stick my hand up long enough for the GPS to connect will it record that location? Or do I have to leave dive mode and mark it, and then come back? The manual doesn't discuss this.
3. Back to the theme of the first question, it'd be great to be able to quickly grab AND NAME a waypoint any time I have GPS connectivity regardless of the mode.
(The use case for all this is that I do a lot of lobster hunting on tanks. Lobsters live in little holes in the rocks that are used over and over by different lobsters. So if you find a honey hole, you want to be able to mark it and then find it again next time you're in the area.)
4. Finally, I accidentally left the watch in one of the apnea modes the first time I used it for a scuba dive and it happily let me do a 60' dive for 35 minutes as an apnea dive. Only later (after being really confused at how little info the computer had provided me) did I realize I wasn't in a scuba mode. This seems an odd design feature. It'd be good to be able to set a threshold of time/depth where the computer assumes that you've made a mistake, that you're not diving apnea, and then switches the dive to a scuba mode. Those settings are clearly going to be diver dependent since there are lots of apnea divers that can go a lot deeper for a lot longer than I can, but for me I'd set it up that if I'm deeper than 50' and/or down for over 90 seconds (and I still have a pulse) it should assume that I've got a bottle on my back. Oh, and out of curiosity, if I'd figured this out during my dive would it have allowed me to switch from apnea to single-gas under water and carried over the dive profile so the computer would be able to calculate things correctly? I can see this happening again at some point in the future...
Thanks,
-Ben
