speleo techincs Novas

[Johnny]

Its been done on 3 LED's!!! and no not by me

This surely illustrates a point that I have always made about LED's.
Yes they work, yes they are lightweight and yes they last a phenomenal amount of time. Perfect if you want to bosh around a cave, only seeing what is in front of you in a pale lifeless glow.

One of my best caving memories is looking out from the Eagles Nest at the top of Hurricane in the Gouffre Berger. The stream was thundering down the pitch and a wind howled around the huge chamber below.
All of this was warmly lit by my carbide, spitting and hissing as it fought to stay lit, the flame sparkling in water droplets that whirled around in front of me. Awesome!

I don't think that it would have been quite the same if I had three LED's strapped to my helmet!

 

[Huw Groucutt]

So you take LEDs for most of caving, allowing you to use helmet mounted batteries and last a lot longer, and have a halogen bulb aswell (e.g. fx3 type), to switch to for looking at things a bit better.

But yes 3 LED's would be crap, 7 more realistic IMHO.

 

[paul]

According to the latest Descent, after suggestions from David Gibson and others, Speleotechnics plan to change the Nova to have 3 light levels (instead of 5) and also to make a software modification so that it remebers the current light level when switched off so that it is restored when you switch on again.

Sounds like a good idea to me. 5 levels was too much.