I had recently written about the benefits of Shearwater making the SurfGF field persistent after clearing deco but was also waiting for that change to be “back-ported” to the Petrel2 hardware. I noted at the end of the article that a Shearwater support engineer said they were going to make the changes available in the older hardware.
Well, my dive buddy Drew Wilson texted me the other day and said that the new version (v93) was available for the older Petrel units.
I was on the Yukon today and had a chance to test it out.
I enabled the “mini” console that shows three data fields and moves the NDL field / Deco Stop field to the upper right. One of the fields is “hard-wired” to Time-To-Surface (TTS) and the other two fields are configurable. I chose SurfGF and Ceiling.
You can see the SurfGF increase as you conduct your dive. Pardon the poor picture, but you can see that my SurfGF is 53 and I have about 20 minutes until I get into deco:
After you get into deco, the display changes to show your first deco stop:
Then, after deco clears, the SurfGF stays “persistent” and you can see it decrease below whatever you have set for your GF Hi (in this case, I had GF Hi set to 80):
Bravo Shearwater!
Now, if I could just get the Bailout TTS, it would be even better!
I’m still a bit undecided on the “mini” display with three fields. I think I will probably switch back to one data field (SurfGF) and then have TTS on my NERD2. I like to have TTS displayed so I can monitor my run time and it shows in the “mini” display but it is really small and a bit hard to read.
