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Joel, > Billy Deans has used the Nem II and IIa for years, I have used them for > years ( i have 4 of them now). Granted some early units had problems, and i > had my share of them early one, as have all computers, but these units work > quite well. It may be true that current models are trouble-free. I haven't followed the Cochran saga recently. But I seriously doubt that many dive computers have had the checkered past that the Nemesis had. My first exposure to the Cochran dive computer was to test drive a pair of them on cave dives at Ginnie springs in 1994. I was loaned one and on the first dive it died at 10', not to be usable again that day. So I was given another new one to try and IT "died" at 10'. Since then I've heard dozens of stories of failures of all kinds and in various modes, such as during decompression and at max depth. I had one dive store owner tell me that it was hit-and-miss, one case would come in and they'd nearly all work. Another case would come in and most would NOT work--straight out of the box. And I don't remember this as being just early, isolated incidents that were resolved. That was the problem, based on what I heard, many weren't resolved and many Cochran users simply had to eat the $1000 they had invested. At the same time, the Cochran company was advertising heavily. I saw their ads in many dive mags. As the Nemesis computers started having problems I saw angry owners complain about the lack of technical support from Cochran's company. I think early on they tried to give good customer service, but based on what I heard, as the devices started going back, the service got worse. Computers would take a while to get fixed then fail on the first dive back to the owner. There was an angry thread going on for some time on Compuserve about the Nemesis and Cochran's public relations efforts there. I've only been diving since 1987, but I've never heard of a dive computer that had such extensive, long-running problems and which created such ill-feelings in its users. It's true, many Nemesis users are loyal and love the device and may have even had years of good service, but that's true of any lemon. Even the Yugo and Corvair have fan clubs. <g> Finally, my personal feeling is that the basic design of the Nemesis is flawed. The computer and sending unit are one and the same: a brick attached to the first stage. If the sending unit fails or the signal is lost, the wrist unit is essentially a dumb terminal and completely useless to the diver for bail-out purposes. I can't imagine a worse design. All your dive info is in the brick and you can only access it AFTER the dive is over when you synch up with your PC. At least with the other designs I've seen, the Scan 5 and the Air-X, if you lose the sending unit or the signal you still have a fully-featured dive computer on your wrist to complete any deco obligation, all you lose is gas info. I have no info about Cochran's recent products and so have no opinion about them, but based on what I saw others go through with the Cochran company, I'd never buy a device from them. I think if you started soliciting user experiences online, you'd get more complaints than blessings. Later, JoeL -- Send mail for the `techdiver' mailing list to `techdiver@aquanaut.com'. Send subscribe/unsubscribe requests to `techdiver-request@aquanaut.com'.
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