User Review: Highgear Aerial

Highgear Aerial
Above: The current Aerial, which may differ slightly from the version reviewed.

Reviewed April 4, 2006 by Garreth Biegun

Rating:
Price Paid: $141

The second altimeter watch I owned and I liked it until I decided to return it...

The altimeter works well, but the programming creates problems. The auto-lock is designed to recognize when you have not changed your altitude for greater than 30 minutes and then lock in that altitude so that slow changes in barometric pressure do not alter your altitude reading. The watch is supposed to then recognize when a change in pressure occurs rapidly (signalling that you are changing altitude again) and automatically turn off the lock feature. Alternatively, you can manually turn off the lock feature by pressing any button.

I found that the autolock NEVER turned off automatically. I could change my altitude by even 1500 ft in a matter of 10 minutes (driving or on a ski lift) and the watch did not unlock. In fact, sometimes I would manually unlock the watch and it would autolock while I was out skiing the resort! This also means that the run-counter (a cool feature idea) did not work.

So I returned the watch and am looking for one that does not include an automatic altitude lock. I'm also looking for more reviews of this watch to see if other people ran into a similar problem.