As you might remember – Garmin issued a recall for Garmin quatix watches during the
summer of 2013.
Well – FINALLY I got a “new” quatix – about 2 weeks ago. The new quatix watch works almost like the old one. But so far I have not burned my wrist 🙂 as the old one could.
But it seems like they have changed the GPS software – now the GPS has a heck of a lot of dampening – so GPS speed indication can take 30-60 seconds to show the speed you are really doing. That is COMPLETELY useless.
Sailing in a dinghy you need fast feedback on how fast you are going. You don’t have time to wait a minute or two before you are certain what your speed is. I rather have a battery life of 4 hours than any kind of speed dampening. I have looked through the manual and cannot find anywhere to disable speed dampening – so I guess that is a “factory feature”
Anyway – I still think the watch is mostly useless due to the small screen. Racing with it on in my dinghy is close to impossible. The numbers are too small – and you need too many button presses to make it useful. When you are busy handling multiple sails while steering – sailing single handed – there are no free hands to press a lot of buttons multiple times to get to the menu you need – or the display you need for that part.
So if you sail dinghy – you are better off using a dedicated sailing computer like Velocitek or the likes where the display is huge and crisp – and GPS speed is close to instant. But on a bigger cruiser / sail boat – results might be better. I might get a “NMEA 2000 -> ANT +” interface for it and try it out on my big boat at some point. But I’m not really “burning” to try it.
But on my wishlist would be a wireless ultrasonic solar powered Wind-dicator 🙂 that could talk to the sailing computer – and survive the dinghy being upside down from time to time. That would be neat!
So something like LCJ Capteurs CV7SF but with Bluetooth LE AND ANT+ interface. ANT+ alone would not cut it for me as it is to proprietary and owned by Garmin.
