I've been trying the OSTC during the last three weeks (holidays
) in CCR and OC dives and have some improvements to report.First of all, I did most of my with someone using a VR3 CCR Trimix and similar gases. I used a manual GF and Pyle deep stop deco method have nothing irrelevant of crazy to report concerning the deco times, max GF was for me 70 % (felt very good after the dives
).One of my points was the gas setup which is quite laborious, especially when you want to set up a 10/50 and you press one time to much ... or you gas analyse is slithly different from your gas planned so a +- option as for some CF should be nice, a was thinking about a 1/10 option also but I've just read the last posts and saw you got a solution for that (holding the button pressed).
Another point is for the bailout. I tried it several times as test and also during a real one. Going over to bail out works good, choosing the appropriate gas and switching gas also. But when you want to go back to CCR (for testing purpose it is quite obvious) mode instead of getting back to the first gas (for me 10/50) it went back to air and no way to get it back to 10/50 PpO2 1.2, it still displayed bail in that case. You could wonder why this could be interesting, therefore the following incident report:
I was diving since 20 min on 45 m mean when my BOV started to make a lot of bells, not seeing anything I switched over to bail out which did not solve to problem and started going up immediatly towards half depth where I could take my second bail out gas. Meanwhile a took my regular second stage on my first bail. Once arrived a half depth i switched over to my second deco gas, turned down my first bail out gas which stopped the jaccusi and only then switched the OSTC. It's not your first priority when you switching to bail out, I can assure you ... There I could look more calm to what was happening and solved the problem (BOV's second stage connection did loosen a bit). Once I was sure there was no problem with the rebreather I swicthed over again to CCR and wanted to do the same for the OSTC which didn't work, so I finished my dive on appropriate self-made tables with the OSTC calculating the end of dive on air.
Another point is that my buddies followed me and were ready to pass me over their gases in case of. The point is also that in that case I should have had to choose the nearest gas to their gases in my five disponible gases for calculating the end of the dive, nothing arduous but an option to setup one new gas during the dive could be a possibility.
My last point after this long post. I saw my friend struggling and pressing buttons with his VR3 for setting up or during dives and I'm quite happy I had the very intuitive and easy to use OSTC. He tried it and did even not have to read the manual to get started and I think he will order soon
.Yvan