Dive Rite Nitek Q - VPM??

[johnnyblackau]

Question - I'm considering progressing into the deco course later this year, and have really been working through some good books (Mark Powell - Deco for Divers, etc. ) to form some solid background knowledge, and in my keenness i've downloaded some dive planning software - and being the owner of a nitek q it uses the buhlmann model with gradient factors. The only software i can see that supports this and not the VPM is multi-deco.

Heres the questions - is VPM the most common used algorithm used in deco dives? how much does it differ from Buhlmann ? finally, any ideas why Dive Rite doesn't support

Thanks in advance.

Blackie

 

[GrimSleeper]

There should be a fair number of Buhlmann GF planners around - I've got iDeco right here on my iPad. Don't use it much for iPlanning, though, as my personal preference is for VPM, but if someone wanted to plan a dive using Buhlmann (because they planned to use a computer as back-up, for example) I'd happily do so as long as we can agree gradient factors - I like my deco gentle, so I used to use 25-75 when I dived Buhlmann regularly.

Both are perfectly valid models - Shearwater computers come with BGF as standard and VPM as an unlockable option. In the end, the reasons for using VPM rather than BGF are essentially philosophical, but that's a whole different subject. In real terms, properly used, the outputs from each algorithm are similar enough that both are about equally likely to get you out of the water unbent.

Your instructor probably won't let you use the computer as a computer anyway (most tec instructors I know, including me, like to start students off with bottom timers and pre-cut tables), so it won't really matter for a while. Multi-Deco is a good piece of software anyway - why not buy it and see exactly how the profiles differ, and how similar you can make them using GF? It'll help you get a handle on the difference in the assumptions underlying the two models, and you may just end up sticking with Buhlmann anyway.


Sent from my iPad, slowly, using Tapatalk HD

 

[bakodiver391]

What's wrong with Nitek Workbench? It's free and it'll match your GF exactly.