Garmin has announced two new styles to their popular Instinct range. The Tactical Black and Tactical Coyote Tan are the new colours available. Both watches are available now in Australia and retail price is $549 AUD. The watches come with the following:
Instinct Tactical Edition (Black) | $549 RRP | Charging/Data Cable | Documentation/Manual
Instinct Tactical Edition (Coyote Tan) | $549 RRP | Charging/Data Cable | Documentation/Manual
Instinct Tactical Edition VS Instinct Original
There are very few differences between the models with the changes being completely software based. Though there is a small design difference in that the tactical editions include the word tactical on top of the watch face display. It looks like Garmin has just shifted some of their software features unique to the Tactix Charlie over to the Instinct tactical editions.
- Dual Position Format Display
- Night Vision Mode
- Stealth Mode
- Jumpmaster
I’ll break down what each of these new features offer below. The Dual position format allows you to display simultaneously two sets of coordinate systems, for example MGRS and Latitude/Longitude on the one screen.
Night vision mode changes the backlight setting of the screen to reduce to a level that won’t interfere with your vision when using night vision goggles.
Stealth mode disables storage and sharing of GPS position and disable wireless comms. Stealth mode still allows you to see your current GPS position but the locations are not saved to the device’s memory or shared. This is useful if you need to still use GPS functionality on the watch but are in a location that should not be stored.
Jumpmaster allows three jump types: High Altitude-High Opening (HAHO), High Altitude-Low Opening (HALO) and Static. This feature is designed to give you information on the speed of descent and altitude. Settings can be customised further including Desired Impact Point (DIP) and wind set up. Altitude information is based on the Barometric Altimeter, calibrated before using Jumpmaster. Altitude data is updated once per second.
Those are all the feature changes for the new models apart from the new colour offers and the $150 AUD price difference between the tactical editions and original versions.