Recording

[David Young]

Picture this, you’re out for a walk in the countryside, you’ve encountered an ugly dangerous river and found a crossing and then you’ve found a safe path up a cliff to the plateau above.

Darkness is approaching, you’re above the cliffs and the wrong side of the river, and you want to get back to safety.

If you had one of Suunto’s older watches, say a Traverse, or any Garmin dating back to the 1990s, you wouldn’t need to worry about this. Your GPS was recording your route as you walked so you just find the route in memory, select it, and follow it back home.

Sadly Suunto have seen fit to sabotage their so-called flagship S9 watch by removing the logbook.

(There’s some weird Breadcrumbs thing, but seems to me that a misdirected finger swipe or button press risks deleting this for ever. It’s certainly not something you would want to rely on.)

But there we go. Suunto have crippled the S9 watch and if you want to be sure of getting home again your options are (a) wear a Traverse or similar vintage watch on your other wrist or (b) make regular POIs as you go.

The first option seems silly: why would you spend a load of money on a new S9 watch only to wear your old watch as well?

So making POIs it is.  Here we encounter more Suunto weirdness. There’s no river crossing POI and there’s no descent POI.

On the other hand there are a lot of POIs to record things that are or soon will be dead.

Things that are dead because you’ve killed them already or things that will be dead when you’ve gone back to kill them later.

Maybe this is what people in Finland do on their weekends and bank holidays, they go into the forests with their guns and their Suuntos and kill things and then record the location of the kills with the comprehensive library of POIs that Suunto assigns to dead and endangered animals.

For those whose country walks don’t involve leaving a trail of bleeding bodies behind them, can I suggest that Suunto add some new POIs:

• Bridge

• Ford

• Descent

Also can we have Shop, as this is useful in many different contexts.

[freeheeler]

@david-young
nice essay, but you forgot option C : map, compass and being prepared in advance if your adventures are life threatening dangerous

[Fenr1r]

@david-young I see your points.

Can’t speak to descent but I guess everyone has their own take on POIs for linear features. Predictable or discovered crossing (/access) points are the only things for which I use “Coast, lake, river, water” or “Track”. That might be Suunto’s intention with those POI types: otherwise, one would be blobbing “river” all along its course.

Still, others might have a more direct use for the “Coast, etc.”, so maybe more icons for crossings.

It might be helpful to distinguish between Bridges, Fords and Stepping Stones (and maybe wires), tho’, from a getting-soaked-risk-awareness perspective. And perhaps built watercraft launch points. But maybe not worth a bunch of icons: there are still names on the S9s.

Also, 2 types of eatery, 2 types of indoor public accommodation (3 if we include caves), a generic home/building and no pub? Maybe there’s a healthy bias to sober shooting/fishing in the list, but it’s in the urban (or even rural) public house hike that routepoint navigation really comes into its own.

[Dimitrios Kanellopoulos]

@david-young said in Recording:

Maybe this is what people in Finland do on their weekends and bank holidays, they go into the forests with their guns and their Suuntos and kill things and then record the location of the kills with the comprehensive library of POIs that Suunto assigns to dead and endangered animals.

I don’t like your tone here. I don’t like people to lower others. It’s provoking.

However it’s good feedback in a structural way.

[David Young]

@dimitrios-kanellopoulos

Apologies, however 9 out of 34 POIs on my S9 are classified as “hunting”!

From experience I know that if you’ve been making a chain of POIs, and are maybe getting a bit stressed as the light fades, it helps to know what each one denotes.

But mainly I am annoyed that Suunto removed the Record function that is on their older watches. I knew about it before buying the S9 so I suppose I can’t really complain; even so Suunto’s decision still seems crass.

[freeheeler]

@david-young
I think you are talking about a different record function than I do, right?
Because I can see breadcrumbs and I can find back… or is it different what you are missing?

[Brad_Olwin]

@david-young I would not rely on a watch for this and I don’t! Second, there is a find back feature that is similar to the track back on prior watches. Third, you can load a route if it is in your phone offline into the watch and follow the route back. There are options, some I believe better and some worse than the Ambit solutions.

Perhaps next time you could phrase your issue with a question on how to do this rather than berate a company and the individuals working for it, which you obviously know nothing about. I think your post is inappropriately rude.

[David Young]

@freeheeler The Traverse’s Record function is diiferent in that the trail is saved to memory and can be retrieved and used as a route at any time.

The S9’s Breadcrumb exists only while the exercise within which it was generated is active. End the exercise and the Breadcrumb is gone.

[freeheeler]

@david-young
…and then you sync to SA, go to the activity and save it as a route, toggle use in the watch and sync back and you can navigate as usual.

[David Young]

@brad_olwin said in Recording:

In over four years of Traverse use I never once used track back, since I always make a POI for where my car/tent is anyway.

As I said earlier, I did know before buying the S9 that the record function was missing and I have considered all the workarounds.

I would like Suunto to consider restoring it, also can we have some user-defined POI types please.

[freeheeler]

@david-young
I can’t follow you…
you can always ask and wish. some wishes come true, some don’t.

[Mff73]

@freeheeler said in Recording:

@david-young
I can’t follow you…
you can always ask and wish. some wishes come true, some don’t.

I am following him : he requested badly, something he never used, he perfectly knows how to make it differently with a watch he bought in total knowledge.

[David Young]

@freeheeler said in Recording:

@david-young
…and then you sync to SA, go to the activity and save it as a route, toggle use in the watch and sync back and you can navigate as usual.

Thank you, that’s the answer.

I followed the whole process of recording and synching a hike using Bluetooth only and it worked. I have a route on the watch.

[stromdiddily]

You seem to be pretty well informed about the way hunting works