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Jakub Rehacek
Palm Sized Diving

Posted By Jakub Rehacek on 9 January 2004

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Sure, we all do it. Not only do we lug around hefty load of twin tanks, stage bottles, deco and travel mixes, as well as assortment of other dive gear, we also bring along our notebook computers. We use them to plan our dives, and to transfer the dive profiles from our dive computer. The notebook PC is often the most expensive piece of gear we take along, and the one the least equipped to handle the harsh conditions of a boat or jungle travel. Salt, sand, water and your dive buddies can bring a quick demise to your trustworthy electronic companion.

Palm Diving Well, there is a better way. Get a palm-sized Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) device. It is no bigger than a palm of your hand, but can do pretty much everything your notebook PC can. Also, at a price for under $200, it is much easier to replace, should it decide to jump the ship, or be crushed under your buddy’s twin tanks.

There are two types of PDAs. A Pocket PC, which runs a scaled down version of MS Windows operating system, or Palm devices, which run Palm OS by 3Com. I will concentrate on the Palm OS compatible devices, since they are more affordable, there is much more software available for them, and most importantly, it is the system I own and use.

I used to use my notebook PC for the following dive-related tasks:

  • planning (theoretical, of course) of decompression dives using several freely available deco-planning applications (Z-plan, GAP)
  • verification of mine and my buddy’s gas consumption and dive times using spreadsheet calculations
  • transfer of dive profiles from my dive computer into a dive-log software to examine the profile and plan another dive

Decoweenie

Decoweenie Screen Your Palm device can do all that and more. There is an excellent dive-planning software called DecoWeenie. DecoWeenie is a Palm-based fully-fledged decompression program that utilizes Bühlmann's decompression algorithm for mixed gas decompression on both Open Circuit and Closed Circuit diving modes. It is also capable of using different deep safety stop options (Gradient Factors, Pyle, GVE), as well as different input modes to describe the dive profile. It is available (for theoretical use only) at http://www.decoweenie.com

Here are some of the features of the DecoWeenie:

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