Citizen Cyber Aqualand NX
Citizen Cyber Aqualand NX
Written by Ken Monday, 09 June 2008 23:03
| Article Index |
|---|
| Citizen Cyber Aqualand NX |
| First Impressions |
| Manual and charger |
| Using the watch |
| Nitrox diving |
| Dive log |
| Computer synchronisation |
| Long term use |
| Conclusions |
| All Pages |
Citizen Cyber Aqualand NX dive computer review
Price paid: £499 from Ernest Jones
I’ve always been fascinated by watches, especially watches that are so crammed full of useful functions and abilities that telling the time seems to be an afterthought! The Cyber Aqualand NX, part of Citizen’s Promaster range, is almost the ultimate gadget watch. Citizen have managed to fit an advanced dive computer into a wearable watch, which raises the bar on fashionable, chunky and useful wrist-gadgets.
What is a dive computer?
For those people who aren’t divers, I should explain at this point what a dive computer is. When scuba diving, you are breathing air under pressure. For every 10 metres deeper you go, the pressure increases by one atmosphere, so at 30m depth you are breathing air at an absolute pressure of four times atmospheric pressure.
This causes some problems for your body. Under increased pressure more nitrogen (which makes up nearly 80% of the air we breath) becomes dissolved into your bodily tissues. This is fine until you want to come to the surface, and which point the nitrogen (no longer under pressure) tries to turn back into bubbles – if you come up too fast after being at depth too long, the bubbles become too big and block blood vessels, damage nerves and destroy tissue. This is called decompression sickness, also known as the bends, and is incredibly painful not to say potentially deadly.
Commercial divers get around this by de-compressing – as they surface they stop at progressively shallower depths for long periods of time to allow the nitrogen to escape from their bodies slowly. In general sport divers try and avoid having to do decompression stops for safety reasons – ideally if something goes wrong you should be able to surface immediately without any risk of decompression sickness. To make sure this is possible, sport divers limit the amount of time they spend at certain depths.
A dive computer works by measuring the depth you are at (and therefore pressure of the air you are breathing) and constantly calculating how much nitrogen will have dissolved into your blood. It can then display how much longer you can safely remain in the water, adjusting this “no decompression time” limit as you dive deeper or go shallower. The benefit of this is that it allows you to spend more time beneath the surface exploring wrecks, watching the pretty fish or just chilling out.
This is obviously pretty serious stuff – an error or malfunction in your dive computer could result in decompression sickness, which can paralyse or kill.
Until recently, dive computers have been quite large and relatively ugly instruments, with big wide straps, large displays and big buttons. Fine underwater, but not the sort of thing you would wear to a restaurant in the evening! Citizen were one of the first to cram an entire dive computer into a (somewhat) wearable watch, and although the Cyber Aqualand NX has been around for about four years now it is still the top of Citizens range.