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Choosing DiveTracker Sport or Scout for your diving

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While in general both Sport and Scout can be applied to most tasks, each offers a set of features that may make it in particular suited for specific diving tasks. The following advise is based on both customer feedback and our own experience of diving with both systems.

Diving in clear (good visibility) waters:
DiveTracker Scout will guide you when you are out of sight of the boat or exit point. Consider leaving the small receiver always attached to your B/C, so it is available when you need it.

For frequent divers:
You might prefer to use the Scout because it's smaller. Yet, if much of your diving is in low visibility, then the Sport will provide you with more confident directions at close range.

Teaching dive students, and use as rental equipment:
The intuitive LED bar graph, and more narrow/defined beam angle of the Sport receiver makes it easier to operate for students and first-time users.

Limited visibility diving:
At short range, the Sport provides you with a confident direction indication down to a distance of about 6 feet / 2 meters. The Scout may show the same maximum signal strength in all directions if you are closer than about 20 feet / 6 meters. For this reason, Sport is preferred for low visibility diving and in particular if you need to locate a specific point such as the anchor line.

Marking underwater equipment for recovery:
The Sport transmitter has a battery life of about two weeks in the slowest ping setting. This compares to about two days for the Scout transmitter.

Diving in harbors, ponds and other confined locations:
Echoes and generally strong signals can be a problem here. The 'low gain' setting of the Sport receiver helps you reject many of the echoes and improve performance in confined dive sites.

Operating in a swimming pool:
Really, that won't work with either unit in most pools. The signals and echoes will be just too strong. A large, Olympic size pool might be the exception. We recommend the Sport here, always operated in its 'low gain' setting.

Operating over very large distances:
The more defined beam pattern of the Sport receiver (30 degrees for Sport vs. 90 degrees for the Scout), somewhat stronger transmit signal and an extra high gain setting through an internal switch give the Sport a much greater range potential than Scout (1000ft / 300m max. for Scout; 4000ft / 1300m max. for Sport). However, be careful. In many cases, the maximum range is limited by environmental factors such as ray bending, path blockages and background noise to much less than the stated maximums. For general diving, we find the range of both Scout and Sport to be sufficient.

Least probability of flooding:
The Scout has the definite advantage here. Flooding is almost, or possibly entirely unheard of. I can't personally remember a single case. That is because the housing is so small, and it's O-ring is relatively thick in comparison to the housing diameter. This makes the Scout a very forgiving mechanical design. With Sport, we do get theoccasional flooded unit for repair. The O-ring is the same thickness as in Scout, but the housing does have a greater diameter. That means you need to pay greater attention to make sure you don't have any O-ring contamination. Still, for both units incidents of flooding are low.

Best battery availability:
Sport wins here. You can get the six 'AA' batteries for the transmitter and the 9V battery for the receiver just about anywhere. Scout uses a 9V battery in its transmitter, but the 3.6V 1/2 'AA' cell for the receiver is harder to get - and the model of that battery they sell at Radio Shack doesn't work because it can't deliver enough current for the indicator LEDs. Fortunately, the Scout receiver battery does last for about 100 hours of diving.

Finally, we find that more people who start with a Scout eventually buy a Sport. Yet, we also sometimes get the other direction where a Sport owner will buy a Scout. Divers who upgrade to Sport normally seek better performance such as at low range or in confined diving environments. Some also find the Scout LED too hard to read in bright conditions. The few cases we had of divers buying a Scout after they already own a Sport tend to be frequent users who are looking for a receiver size reduction.