D2 Bravo or Apple Watch

rene86mx

Pre-takeoff checklist
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rene86mx
My in-laws are shopping for Christmas presents and they asked what I rather receive :)

Which one would you pick?
 
My in-laws are shopping for Christmas presents and they asked what I rather receive

Which one would you pick?

I used to be an Apple employee and purchased the Apple watch using the 50% employee discount. Seemed the thing to do as it was pretty much required to have an Apple watch on the wrist if you worked at Apple. Gave the darned thing to my son after a while and went back to a standard, analog watch with hands. The Apple watch failed at its most important task for me. To save battery life, the display turns off after a short period of time and the watch has to be shaken or the screen tapped before the display turns back on. I want a watch I can just glance at to see the time, and the Apple watch fails there. Stupid design.

Also, the watch never properly sync’d with the calendar. I would get event reminders for events long deleted on the phone...

Don’t know anything about the D2, but I would certainly stay away from the Apple watch.




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Neither....ask for debit card loaded to be used for fuel.
This, or something else other than the expensive smart watch.

I have a Gen 1 Apple Watch. I find it useful for notifications when the phone is not nearby, for controlling music, or for monitoring a few health items like a FitBit does.

But I never use it in flight. Even to check the time as a clock is right there on the panel and on the GPS.

In addition to the fuel card idea, ask for an Apple iTunes card so you can purchase your subscription to an EFB (ForeFlight, Garmin Pilot, WingX, etc).

Or contribution to your next rating or endorsement.
 
I'm also with neither, but I don't wear a watch.

I'd probably go with the D2 since it's much more unusual and that makes for better jewelry. It also doesn't tie you to Apple's ecosystem.

Apple Watches are on every wrist. They're expensive and mostly useless.
 
One of the few folks I know that has a Garmin D2 is Nate D. aka @denverpilot ... maybe he can supply some insight.
 
To elaborate further @rene86mx ...

Mine was a gift from my wife. One does not just sell off gifts from a wife that said wife thought she was buying something nice. Especially at the price of the “titanium” version. Yeah... $900. Ouch.

It’s a fitness watch. It’s not a pilot watch. Garmin took their $300 fitness watch and jammed some aviation software into it. Poorly. Very poorly.

When using it, the app, the UI and everything scream fitness watch. The thing is excellent at tracking my heart rate. It’s sucks for anything related to Aviation.

1. Like all Garmin Aviation GPS products it needs a subscription to keep the database of waypoints or airports updated. This is a huge fail in Garmin’s part. For $900, just toss in the updates. Seriously. It’s not a primary nav tool and isn’t even marketed as one. Paying $75 to update the database is ridiculous. I pay only slightly more than double that for a whole year of ForeFlight updates and that’s actually a useful flying tool. Garmin wants $75 per CYCLE as best as I can tell. Even if it’s for a year, it’s not worth it. Because...

2. Loading flight plan information into it is done supposedly via Garmin’s own iPad or Android app. Frankly, I never got it to work. It’s not intuitive and you’re locked into their app to load the information, and then as long as everything is okay on the flight you’re going to completely ignore the watch. Completely.

3. Its best “feature” for Aviation is holding down a button on the watch for an emergency “nearest airport” function. If you’re so far into the weeds that the only way you’ll find an airport is your watch, you’re already having and extremely bad day. But I guess if you got into that much trouble it might save your butt. (Plus see need to buy updates. Eff that. Luckily airports don’t move too much.)

4. Altitude functions blow hard chunks. It needs constant “recalibration” to show altitude and it needs an altimeter setting to do that or you use GPS altitude. Here’s where the really crappy stuff comes in...

5. It has WiFi in it but no way to attach it to an access point other than ones you’ve pre-programmed into it at home using the desktop software. And ...

6. Even if it’s in range of that WiFi it will ONLY use it to upload data to Garmin’s FITNESS hub/website and won’t use it to get data for apps like the aforementioned altimeter setting or even a METAR. There’s a nice little METAR app on the watch and it’s utterly useless. Why...?

7. Apps need to use your mobile phone and be connected and paired to an app to get their data from the web. So you literally would pick up your smartphone (which can show you METARs anyway) and launch the Garmin app. Wait for it to finish syncing to the watch and uploading all your FITNESS data for two or three minutes. And then you could flip to the METAR app on the phone and it’ll use your mobile data to show you the weather. Utterly useless. Even weirder? At least on iPhone the watch is ALWAYS connected to your phone. Via Bluetooth. But that can not be used for data unless the Garmin app is running in the phone. It gets all notifications from your phone, however. All the time.

8. Temperature app. It’s on your wrist. It does a great job of telling you your skin temp. LOL. Useless.

9. Flight mode. When it detects you took off it switches to a flight mode. This mode shows you your heading and speed and all of that. What do you usually look at your watch for, in Flight? Oh yeah. The time. Like “how long have I been aloft for fuel burn?” It’s gone off the screen. Oh you can get back to the clock but it’s three menus and button presses up from flight mode. Useless. My instructor thought this was hilarious. “Look! The one thing it doesn’t do as soon as you launch, is tell time. It’s a WATCH, that doesn’t tell time.”

I could go on. It’s a POS compared to their first flight watch that was actually an attempt to make a flight watch and not just a fitness watch with some Aviation crap that doesn’t work right jammed into it, and at three times the price of their fitness watches which are already insanely priced at $300 or so.

My biggest uses for it?

1. Casually looking at the watch to see notifications from the phone. It does NOT have a “clear all notifications” function, however. So it constantly has 40 notifications in it and you learn this little habit of just pushing buttons repetitively to clear them one at a time. If they’d add a damned “clear all” button it’d be a lot more useful. As is, it’s still nice to see stuff without pulling your phone out of your pocket. But only marginally useful because they pile up in the device. And if you’re getting notifications about your Facebook replies or Twitter feed besides iMessage or emails... it’s constantly vibrating. It’s easy to ignore notifications on the smartphone. It’s easy to ignore them on the watch, too... but they never go away until cleared one by one.

2. Heart rate tracking. It’s been kinda fun to watch. It’ll also track other fitness things very well. Or even link to your Garmin fitness hub. It’s a decent fitness watch. Too spendy for what it does though. I wasn’t surprised to see some stupid golf app that you can buy a subscription for it and it’ll track you as you hike around golf courses and let you keep score or something like that on it. Zero interest here. Not Aviation.

3. If you are playing music from an iPhone to airplay or Bluetooth there’s a simple remote control app for start/stop/pause and song skip. That comes in handy once in a while. It works without launching the Garmin app on the phone. Safer when driving to put wrist on top of steering wheel and poke one button to go to the app and then skip a song on shuffle than root around for the iPhone. Problem is, if I’m in the two vehicles that have iPhone integration I can do that from the head unit or the car’s steering wheel controls too. Only one car has a head unit that those vehicle controls work to skip when the phone is connected to the car with Bluetooth and not when connected via the cable. Then the watch is handy.

Maybe if I had eher gotten Flight Plan stuff loaded into it, it would have been fun to turn off the iPad and ignore the rest of the airplane panel and flown somewhere with just the watch. But still. How useless is that? Probably utterly kill the watch battery doing that, too.

Oh. Responsiveness. The processor in be thing is way underpowered. Switching apps or back to my admittedly info heavy “watch face” takes two or three seconds for every button press.

It’s overpriced crap.

I’m with @murphey. Buy AvGas. I could have filled the long range tanks on the 182 twice for what this watch costs and flown 10+ hours with reserve. This thing is a fitness watch with poorly integrated Aviation trinket apps.
 
Thanks @denverpilot for the detailed explanation!

I´m figuring now that Bose+NFlightMic might make more sense since I don´t own a headset
 
Thanks @denverpilot for the detailed explanation!

I´m figuring now that Bose+NFlightMic might make more sense since I don´t own a headset

Not much passive hearing protection in that setup. You flying something really quiet? Any reason you’re choosing that combo over higher quality passive or a purpose made ANR?
 
Thanks @denverpilot for the detailed explanation!

I´m figuring now that Bose+NFlightMic might make more sense since I don´t own a headset
If the expenditure was approaching that of the watch, I'd suggest a look at the Lightspeed Zulu.2 or Sierra headset versus the combo you're suggesting.
 
Thanks @denverpilot for the detailed explanation!

I´m figuring now that Bose+NFlightMic might make more sense since I don´t own a headset

According to pigpen that is a very poor setup for general aviation unless your flying a jet.
 
Apple Watches are on every wrist. They're expensive and mostly useless.

Not sure I agree that they’re on every wrist. Probably see more of them in the Bay area, and lots near the Apple campus in Cupertino, but even here, not all that many, and certainly away from the Bay area, there aren’t as many.

Completely agree that they are mostly useless expensive items!

Even with the employee discount I used to buy mine, I wish I’d spent the money on a tank of Avgas instead. Certainly wouldn’t recommend one.

You want a fitness tracker? Get a FitBit. You want a watch? Buy a real watch. You want some overpriced piece of junk which doesn’t even show you the time unless you shake or tap it? Get an Apple watch.



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I´m figuring a $350 budget. The D2 Bravo was refurbished and the Nflightmic I thought was a good approach for budget ANR

Back to square one
 
I´m figuring a $350 budget. The D2 Bravo was refurbished and the Nflightmic I thought was a good approach for budget ANR

Back to square one
If you can figure out how to nearly double your budget, you can get a used Lightspeed Zulu.2 which will serve you for a very long time.

Alternatively, there are still some Lightspeed 30-3G's which are ANR that can be found for your budget. They will be a little older and worn, but they are still supported by Lightspeed and will do well until you can afford a newer setup.
 
Save up and get a Breitling. That's a watch!
 
I´ve got a Bell&Ross... that´s a watch :)
 
$15 Timex. Lasts a couple of years until the battery dies and then I get a new one.

All my money goes into upgrading ratings, improving my skills.
 
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