D2 Delta

With some hesitation I decided to upgrade my faithful Garmin watch. For the last two years I have been using the D2 Bravo - the "aviator" variant of the fēnix 3 platform. And I have to say it's been amazing what Garmin managed to add to the D2 Delta, which is based on fēnix 5 plus.

The most notable new outdoor features (I have skipped one generation - the fēnix 5, so some of them are not exclusively the "5 plus" additions) are:

• The battery life has been increased significantly (this was BTW my key motivation for the upgrade)
• The satellite navigation receiver is now Galileo - capable
• There is the new blood oxygen saturation level sensor (I am still learning how to use it)
• The watch can connect to the inReach Mini, so the bi-directional satellite messaging and weather functions are now available on a wrist.

Plus there are some "urban" features like Garmin Pay (NFC) and Music (the watch can now stream music directly to Bluetooth earbuds). And for pilots there is the meteorological information and radar graphics (NEXRAD). This feature uses a phone as a gateway to download the NEXRAD radar graphics, location-based meteorological reports (METARs) and terminal forecast (TAF) information – including wind, visibility, precipitation, cloud cover, temperature, dew point, barometric pressure and more.

Last but not least - there are maps!

The watch comes with some maps preloaded (my US version came with Worldwide Basemap and TopoActive US) and any Garmin - compatible maps can be uploaded.

Yes, you can now have a high resolution topographic map of the entire globe in a watch!

The beautiful part of that is that there are plenty of high quality maps in Garmin format available. I opted for the OpenTopoMap (it covers most of Europe and parts of Asia) for the recent trip to Georgia. Installation is a breeze - download the map, connect the watch to a computer and drag the file over to the Garmin folder on the watch.