Garmin

The Tech Giant that Changed the Game

For years, the dive computer market was a slow-moving beast. Then, in 2017, a giant woke up. Garmin, the world leader in GPS and avionics, dropped the Descent Mk1, and the industry changed overnight. Before Garmin, you wore a dive computer for diving and a watch for daily life. Garmin asked, “Why not have one device that does everything?”

Garmin brought the power of the “smartwatch” to the regulator. They introduced high-resolution colour screens, surface GPS entry/exit logging, and optical heart rate monitoring to the wrist of the diver. With the Descent Mk2 and Mk3, they added SubWave sonar technology, allowing divers to monitor their buddy’s tank pressure and even send pre-set messages underwater.

For the UK diver, Garmin represents the ultimate convergence of lifestyle and life support. It is a computer that tracks your run in the morning, pays for your coffee at the service station, guides you to the dive site with GPS maps, and then runs a full Bühlmann ZHL-16C decompression algorithm with gradient factors on your technical dive. It turned the dive computer from a specialist tool into a daily wearable, putting the power of a flight deck on your wrist.