The Ultimate Freedive Computer
Posted By Paul Kotik on 17 July 2006
You and your freediving computer: true love or a marriage of convenience? Sure, it works, more or less, but isn't it true that sometimes, perhaps when you've had a few beers and glance it from the corner of your eye, you wonder whether you couldn't do better if you had it to do all over again ?
Perhaps sometimes at depth the liquid crystal display characters are a little hard to read unless you contort yourself into exactly the right position - and not neccesarily one which is well streamlined. The user interface and menu system on some popular models jack my heart rate up to triple digits, designed, apparently, by sadistic uber nerds for the sole purpose of defeating hypoxic brains.
And then, there's the battery. It dies, and all too soon. When it does one can either change it ( and incur the considerable risk of failure ) or follow instructions and ship it back to the factory for service. Pain, money or both.
Eric Fattah saw opportunity where others saw a list of niggling complaints.
"There's no doubt that freediving computers have gotten better", he conceded."The best ones are pretty good, in fact, with no fatal flaws. It's just that the little things, in the aggregate, add up to overall dissatisfaction."
Eric's a former world record holder in the constant ballast discipline. His self-discipline, meticulousness and systematic approach to everything he does are something of a legend. He compiled the exhaustive list of the faults apparent in commercially available dive computers and set out to design them away. The result is the F1 : arguably the Ultimate Freedive Computer.
"Display visiblity and the battery problem were obvious", Fattah recalls. "Less so are things like a too-slow sampling rate, which can make your computer understate the depth you reach on a dive and omit critical detail from recorded dive profiles. For example, arm strokes in the no-fins disciplines. Some of the available computers made reviewing the stored data a problem, too. Most normal people find getting the data to the PC somewhere between frustrating and impossible. Assuming the computer remembers the data. Most of them had too little memory, so old dives get forgotten."
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