This is the new Garmin D2 Delta PX ultimate aviator watch with pulse
oximeter and brand new this will cost you one thousand eight hundred and forty
nine Australian dollars. Now this watch has been sent to me by the kind team...
This watch has been given to me by the kind team at Australian Aviation
magazine. They're actually giving three of these away as part of a subscription
offer which I'll tell you about. So I have to send this back and that's why
it's still got like the plastic on it and I'm supposed to be very careful and
not put it in the wet grass here in Albert Park.
So I wanted to test if this
is the best watch that you can buy if you are a pilot if you're into your
aviation if you just want a really cool smart watch for things like running and
exercise as well. How good does this watch actually perform? But this is
really optimized for the pilot market and it does have something called a
pulse oximeter built into it as well which actually determines your oxygen
saturation levels in your bloodstream. And we're going to test that in flight shortly.
But is this watch any good?
This comes in three different sizes... (what are they?)
There's a 42 a 47 and a 51 millimetre face. If you want the pulse
oximeter you have to buy the 51 millimetre face that's the most
expensive one and that's the one with this titanium band as well. The other
smaller ones have like a smaller leather strap that you can get. Also who is this
designed for? Straight out of the box, like I don't have the smallest wrist in
the world but... I realize this isn't a long-term solution.
So what do you get in the box?
Now this watch has a ton of features and things like Garmin Pay, all the GPS
functionality in here flight planning, METARS which is some of your
meteorological information like your weather forecast. There is a lot that
this watch can do which I'm not going to be able to demonstrate in this video but
I want to give you a bit of a high level of like the key features that you
probably would use on this watch if you were a pilot and preferably if you do
fly with other Garmin devices in your cockpit like Garmin pilot on your iPad
and maybe things like the Garmin GTN 650s or 750s... Basically it's a bit like
Apple you know, the more Garmin stuff you use the better your experience is going
to be overall. Now straight off the bat this is not a sponsored video in fact
just like Bose aviation I have reached out to Garmin in the past and nothing.
They haven't got back to me that there's no word on sponsoring the channel they
didn't want to give me free product. So not sponsored by Garmin unless you want
to get onboard Garmin... Therefore this is going to be a very frank and a very
honest review of whether this watch is any good.
It is really I do like it.
So of course there's only one way to truly test a watch that was designed for flying.
Inside Echo Yankee Zulu of course. So I thought what we'd
do is take a quick flight with the Garmin D2 watch just to see what it can
do actually in the aircraft. I have a special guest on board as well, hi
Shannon! Hi. Shannon is one of the instructors at Air RTP so she's gonna be my safety pilot extra
pair of eyes today just helping me out with the flight because I'm gonna be
fiddling around with technology and I think that's probably not the safest
thing to do whilst trying to fly an airplane at the same time. Now the Garmin
D2 does obviously connect through to Garmin pilot on your iPad as well.
It takes a while to set this up so don't just jump in you're plane with your
brand new watch and think you can set it all up whilst you're sitting here in the
cockpit. It took me about 15 minutes to basically download the apps you have to
download something called Garmin Connect which is the app that you use on your
iPad to tell your watch to talk to the iPad before it can talk to Garmin pilot.
So you need Garmin Connect and Garmin Pilot both on the iPad before you can
start transferring flight plans between your iPad and your watch. But once that's
done then is it's relatively straightforward after that to sync
flight plans between your iPad and watch which is what we did on the ground just
now, loaded a very quick flight plan to the South
clicked on the Garmin Connext icon at the top and then that sends it directly through to your watch.
So as we're climbing out now Shannon's got control
of the aircraft now so we're climbing up to about 4,500. It knows that Moorabbin
where we've departed from is our nearest therefore it gives me a bearing
to it it's abearing of 355. Would you concur that's about right?
It's kind of north of.. Yeah it's kind of that direction. Three minutes to Moorabbin
from here got the track that we're currently on, the distance 8.2
nautical miles for Moorabbin as well. So that's that's kind of useful I suppose.
So then there's the basic moving map on here as well where you've got some
pretty basic it's a little bit fiddly with the buttons but you can zoom in and
out you can pan left and right so you can see basically where you are around
you. That's running off the GPS on the watch but it concurs with what's going
on with the moving map that we've got here on the Avidyne display as well.
That's kind of fun That's quite cool isn't it. I don't know why you'd need it but it's cool.
I think that's gonna be like the summary of the review I don't know why you need one, but...
One thing I really want to try in here is I know you can do a direct to a waypoint
using your watch but I want to know if that could sync through to the avionics
here in the aircraft. So basically, can you steer the airplane with your Garmin watch?
I'm kind of hoping you can't because I think if you can just lean on
it all of a sudden. Yeah or someone in the backseat has the watch on.
Alright we're going to go direct see if it goes direct to Carrum. So C ... A ... and enter
Alright so that's done direct to Carrum on the watch, oh it didn't do it.
What I think happens is you can do a direct to, so we put in Carrum which is over there but it doesn't actually
you know if you know better if you've used this watch and you have done that
before let me know the comments but what it sort of does is it it tells you the
direct to you it gives you the the track the timing is etc how to get to that
waypoint, but it won't then send it through to
your flight plan which I don't disagree is it's not necessarily a bad thing.
Alright next test I want to quickly before we get back to Moorabbin I want to test the
pulse oximeter on here as well because as you know if you watch the channel
I've now got the oxygen bottle here in Echo Yankee Zulu. Alright so oxygen
saturation level on my finger pulse oximeter which I've used for a while now
is 97 percent and on the Garmin D2 so that's saying 95%. So 97 95 % it could
have changed my percentage or to it between the time it took they did take
about a minute or two just to read here on the watch but pretty close. And look that
is useful because during that finger based pulse oximeter around with you
it's just another thing that you have to bring. Having that actually on your watch
I will say especially if you are flying in higher altitudes obviously that is pretty useful.
Do you want to be in the thumbnail? No!
One other cool thing about this watch is once you've landed it's just
like when you've been recording exercise you can stop it and it will track that
flight through to your Garmin logbook. So it keeps a digital copy of every flight
you do with the watch. Alright so is this watch worth $1849
Australian dollars? Well to answer that question yes it's worth that amount of
money I would say because for what it can actually do like for all the GPS
navigation functions as it has for all the exercise tracking it has for all the
customization you can put on there the syncing to do with things like Garmin
Pilot that you saw the pulse oximeter all of that like it has a ton of
features and so many that I haven't actually talked about in this video so
for what it can do is it worth the money yeah.
But do you need a watch like this as a pilot?
Well if you're a student pilot and you're just starting out, no.
Don't spend one thousand eight hundred and forty nine dollars on a watch spend
one thousand eight hundred and forty nine dollars on flight training and fuel
and taking your exams. If you're a middle hour pilot and you're just flying for fun
then maybe look it's a fun watch it's a good toy it's it's a nice gadget but
yeah it is expensive and you can use watches like my Forerunner 935 for things
like UTC time and tracking your exercise you obviously don't have the GPS
functionality and all the aviation stuff like pulse oximeter in here but you can
still do a lot with the smart watches and the other branded smart watches that
are out there on the market anyway. And then for the experienced pilot who maybe
does fly with Garmin products you know like your 650s and your Garmin pilot
on your iPad it really is the best solution in terms of a watch that
integrates with all of those other features.
So in itself, excellent watch with really good features but you have to decide do you
want to spend that money on something like this or learning to fly something like this?
Okay apparently I have to give this back to Australian Aviation now.