New Hammerhead Sets - Announcement

diverklondike

Kevin,

Mine showed up this afternoon and look awesome!!!

Plan to get them wet this weekend!

Thanks

Mark

heyydude

We have something "special" for you Mark 15 Divers out there.

Sooooooooooooooooooon....

Dave Sutton

Really?

Oh well, what's another "soon" in the big picture anyhow........


Smile,

Dave

__________________
"Changes in Lattitudes, Changes in Attitudes, Nothing remains quite the same".... www.nobubblediving.com

UWSojourner

Yes, but just a few days ago this new release was a "soon". Good for Kevin. "Soon" comes, just not "soon" enough for us impatient ones, me chief among them.

Dinspiration

Please give us a feedback about the new sets ASAP......

Konaquatica

Hey Dude !

Looks really good and I'm looking forward to one of Konaquatica's customers/diving guests diving our deep Kona reefs this week, on an Optima fitted-out with your latest-and-greatest handsets. We'll check-it-out for you with a few 200 - 300 fsw dives. Having the battery voltage is an obvious winner, even before you factor in the user-definable warning. Personally, I love the secondary deco option, but there are a lot of good features to really like on this one: knurled knob for the battery cap with its integrated spring, decisive steps taken to have the unit shut-down when out of the water, embossed legends next to the screen, altitude cal.

It will be nice to touch base and catch-up, when we have the opportunity to talk about your newest Hammerhead wrist units.

Meanwhile, could you give a little more information on the expedition level upgrade for my fellow forum members and readers ?

Aloha, congratulations and all the best,

Jim Holt

Konaquatica Dive Center
The Big Island
Kona, Hawaii

P.S. Could I request a John McKinney non-verbal salute, signaling feature on your next upgrade ? Ya never know, it could come in handy someday !

__________________
Hawaii's Rebreather & Tech Headquarters - Megalodon, O2ptima, KISS, Inspiration & Evolution authorized dealer.
IANTD Platinum Facility
CCR Trimix Instructor
"Experience Your Diving Dreams At Konaquatica"
www.konaquatica.com

robvdmr13

He Kevin,

They look absolutely great.

I do have a question about the secondary deco though. Let`s say you have to bail out and go to OC. Half way through your deco your primary fails. This would mean that any time you change something in the primary deco (during a dive) you would have to start up the secondary deco, make the change and turn it back off.
How does this hold up during diving. Is turning the secondary deco on and off easy or time consuming?

I know that on most dives on CCR you hardly ever change anything, but that means you`ll also probably be likely to forget to change the secondary as long as the primary is still functioning.

Keep up the good work.

Regards,

Robert

diverklondike

Ok... Here is a short dive report, comments and feedback...

To us a phrase of Dave Thompson's... These are the dog's bollocks... (my understanding is that this is a good thing... lol... )

Saturday...

I did a 15 minute pool dive in the afternoon just to make sure everything was working ok before the drive to the boat. One of the things that I immediately noticed was that the new wrist units are lighter than their predecessors. It was also nice to see the battery voltage display. BTW, changing batteries is now a lot quicker with the new finger tight caps.

That evening after getting set up I entered my normal gases/bailout options, and deco preferences. 10/85 GF. This took a little longer than I had planned since I was had to enter it into both units since I elected to also have the deco capability turned on as part of the upgrade. (It's a couple extra dollars over the wrist unit upgrade it self but well worth it.)

Sunday...

I did two dives, 190 fsw 45 minute BT and 190 32 minute BT.

- Deco on the two wrist units was identical.

- Once again it was great to have the new battery indicator showing voltage on both of the units. My personal preference is to use traditional AA 1.5V batteries and simply toss them at the end of the day. At the end of the day the battery in my primary was 1.3V and secondary was 1.4V

- With the change in the wrist unit as a whole, the status LED on the side of the unit has changed. In the previous version there was an actual window that allowed you to see the color of the LED that matched the "alert" status of the electronics. The new lens that Kevin is using makes the status display appear brighter and easier to see for both yourself.. and your buddy...

- My personal routine after dives like this are to continue to breath O2 on the loop for 5-10 minutes after surfacing. With my last wrist units I would rinse then with fresh water after getting off the loop and then wipe them dry. I did this as a best practice to ensure that they properly shut down.

I was very impressed to see that with the new design of the wet switches, the wrist units shut down 2-3 minutes after I got out of the water and did not need the extra help being dried off with a towel. This was the case in both dives.

The net is that it's great have dual integrated deco. My personal approach was and probably will continue to be to keep the deco running on both units at all times. Since I do really like studying deco theory, I plan to run some dives with different GF on each unit. Comparing things like 10/85 that is more deep stop driven to 30/75 that would get you shallow quicker but greatly penalize you on the shallow stops. In my mind this is a very powerful feature of the HH.

Now to answer a question raised in the previous post, about maintaining both the primary and secondary while diving, I did not find that an issue at all. Before the dive I selected my Dil on the surface on both units and did not change anything while in the water other than the set point on the primary during the entire dive. Now if I were to do a gas change in the water I would need to make the change on both units. This however is something that you would need to do with any second computer that you may be using as back-up. I will go on the record to say that it’s a lot quicker to change your selected gas on the HH than it is on either a VR-3 or an HS Explorer.

Great job Kevin!!

Dive Safe..

Mark

ScubaDadMiami

Have some green for a great report, Mark. I, too, can't wait to play with the sets and study the profiles with various gradient factors side by side.

__________________
Howard Packer
IANTD CCR Instructor
Miami Beach, Florida
CCRDiveTraining.com

heyydude

Hey Robert,

Yes, that would be true. What we were trying to do is give you something you could use as a "genuine" backup computer - one that is integrated into your system, uses the same algorithm, electronics, etc - all the various elements that can possibly affect the output.

Over the years, we've received numerous requests to do this, but it didn't seem necessary, given the number of VR-3's and HS Explorer's out there.

(Remember, we were the first one's to actually SUPPORT third-party monitoring of our system - and still do, I might add).

But there do seem to be differences (at least anecdotally) in the Deco between sets (for whatever reason).

This led us to add the Deco ability to the Secondary, which involved a near complete rewrite of the Secondary firmware.

Once we decided we were going to add this feature, I thought it would be nice to have the ability to turn the Deco on/off - some divers not wanting it to be "on" all the time. Since there was no huge penalty in terms of power consumption of the Secondary, I thought it would be cool if we had it track your dive anyway, and be there, like a Lifeboat, just-in-case.

When I actually saw this in action during Beta testing, I was stoked. It was really, the coolest thing I had seen in Rebreather controls in a long time. I actually started giggling when, after a 2 hour bottom time at 224' on 16/84 the Secondary returned the exact same TRT and Ceiling.

Back to your question - if you think about it - you could use it in other creative ways - like running a separate set of conservatism for working vs. easy swimming, etc.

I'm sure the end-users on this forum will come up with lots of cool ways to use it, which is why we keep trying to come up with new, cooler things for them to play with in order to make rebreather diving safer, convenient, and more fun.

It's a beautiful thing, man...



Take care,

Kevin.