Name: Aircraft Dial
Rating: 1 (2 reviews)
Author: VyteraLabs

Aircraft Dial turns your watch into a panel-mounted instrument: a screwed bezel, a black dial with a full sixty-mark tick ring, luminous markings and a triangle index at twelve.

IT IS YOURS TO ARRANGE

Three sub-dials and a readout at six o'clock, in the position an altimeter puts its Kollsman window. Each shows whatever you choose from sixteen metrics: date, battery, steps, heart rate, calories, distance, floors climbed, active minutes, Body Battery, stress, altitude, barometric pressure, temperature, notifications, and time to recovery.

Seven of them have a scale and drive their needle across a 240 degree sweep: battery, steps, floors and active minutes against their goals, heart rate against your own zones, Body Battery and stress against theirs. The other eight have no range to graduate, so they render as a plain readout rather than a dial with graduations and no needle.

Barometric pressure reads in hPa or inHg, your choice.

The top sub-dial holds either the running seconds or a data field, not both. Choose a field for it on the watch and the second hand steps aside automatically.

STEP GOAL ON THE OUTER RING

The forty-eight small marks between the numerals fill clockwise from twelve as you go, so the whole tick ring is a step gauge that costs no dial space. A filled mark is both longer and a different colour, so it reads at a glance and on any dial. One mark is a little over two percent of your goal. The hour marks never change, so the dial still reads as a clock.

FOUR INSTRUMENT LIGHTINGS

Night, white on black. NVG Green, phosphor green for the dark. Amber Nav, warm and free of blue light. Day VFR, dark ink on a light dial for bright sun.

BUILT FOR THE BATTERY

The second hand has four settings, from off to a sub-dial sweep that stays alive in low power, so you decide what it costs. Asleep, the face redraws once a minute.

ALWAYS-ON DISPLAY

On an AMOLED watch the sleeping face is drawn on black, at full brightness, drifting every minute so nothing is held lit. Three levels: Minimal for the last of the battery, Standard for the hour marks, quarter numerals and solid hands, and Full to keep your bottom reading on screen as well. Standard is the default, and it stays under half of Garmin's limit on how much of the panel a face may light.

USING IT

Select the face on your watch and choose Customize, beside Apply, to set every option on the watch itself. Everything is also in Garmin Connect under Connect IQ, if you prefer the phone.