Yesterday I had an interesting thing happen to me while diving my Optima FX w/ Delrin Hammerhead Handsets, so I thought I'd post it and see if this was an isolated incident or if it's happened to others as well:

I was diving on the Wreck of the Ancient Mariner in approximately 70 feet of depth yesterday morning. There was minimal to no current and the visibily was probably in the area of 75'. At the time of this incident, I was kneeling in the sand and was taking pictures at the edge of the wreck, while my buddy, who was approximately 25 feet behind me in the sand was practicing some skills, because he had recently made some configuration changes to his setup.

After about 25 minutes of diving at a setpoint of 1.2, I looked at my primary handset, as I had done often throughout the dive, and noticed the screen was blank. I immediately looked over at my VR3 (4th Cell) and noticed my setpoint was just below 1.0 and dropping. I tried pushing the buttons and slightly knocking on the primary handset with my right hand, but no luck, it was dead. I immediatley increased my setpoint manually and turned to notify my buddy of the problem and started for the ascent line, which was only 50 feet from my current position. My buddy immediately understood the signal I gave him that the primary handset had failed and joined me at the ascent line. I ascended, maintaining my PO2 manually and monitoring it via my VR3 and HUD, completed a brief safety stop and exited the water.

The situation never escalated into a bigger problem, because I noticed it pretty early, and the training kicked in pretty smoothly, but that may have been different if I would have not looked at it when I did, which sometimes happens when I'm taking pictures.

Once onboard the boat, I removed my gear, I dried off the handset and fiddled with it a bit, but no luck. I took a backup battery from my tool kit, openned the battery compartment and replaced the battery with a new fresh Duracel and the handset activated up right away. Keep in mind, that the battery that was in the handset was a fresh battery that I had exchanged a couple of hours earlier that morning, as I do every morning before I go diving (At $0.50 a battery, it seems like a reasonable precaution). I then proceeded to take out my volt meter from my tool kit and measured the Duracel, which appeared to be just fine.

I recognize that the battery I removed from my handset could have still been week, even though the voltage appeared ok, but I was just curious if anyone else had experienced a similar problem with the Delrin Hammerhead Handsts before? I did not dive again, so I haven't used my unit since, but it looks ok, should I be concerned? Could it have been a poor contact? If it was the battery, should I not have recieved some sort of battery warning?