The watch that tells you
where north is.

The compass: hold it flat, and stand away from your own gear

One press and the central seconds hand swings round to magnetic north while the digital window at six o’clock gives you the bearing in degrees and one of sixteen points. It reads for sixty seconds and then stops on purpose — a magnetometer running continuously is the fastest way to flatten any watch.

Two habits decide your accuracy, and neither is in the manual’s first page. Hold the watch genuinely level, because tilt is the single largest error source on a wrist magnetometer. And step away from metal — car doors, trekking poles, belt buckles and the phone in your other hand will all pull the needle. Owners who do those two things consistently report it agreeing with a baseplate compass. If it ever disagrees with a reference you trust, run the bidirectional calibration rather than assuming the sensor is broken. If you are navigating from a paper map, set the magnetic declination for where you are standing, because the map is drawn to true north and the watch is pointing at magnetic north.

The altimeter: it is a barometer wearing a different hat

This is the feature people misjudge. There is no GPS here. The watch infers height from air pressure, which means a weather front moving through will change your altitude reading while you are standing perfectly still. That is not a fault in the watch; it is the physics of the method, and every barometric altimeter ever made does it.

So the owner’s rule is: set a reference before you set off. A trailhead sign, a spot height on the map, a phone GPS fix in the car park — anything known. Do that and the -700 to 10,000 m range in 1 m steps behaves. Skip it and the number is decoration. Then treat it as a differential instrument rather than an absolute one: what it is genuinely good at is telling you how much you have climbed and how much is left, which is why the automatic log of high and low points and cumulative ascent is the part you will actually look at afterwards. On a long day, re-set the reference at any known altitude you pass; it stores thirty readings with the date and time against each, so marking a col or a summit as you pass it costs nothing.

One behaviour worth knowing, because it looks like a fault and is not: the altimeter samples every second for the first three minutes after you enter the mode, then settles to whichever interval you have chosen, five seconds or two minutes. That is why it feels alert the moment you call it up and lazy twenty minutes later. Nothing is wrong. If you want it responsive on a climb, choose the five-second interval and accept the slightly higher drain; if you are pacing a long day, two minutes is kinder to the cell.

The barometer: read the shape, not the number

Owners describe the same pattern: reliable over a day, restless hour to hour. Which tells you how to use it. A single reading off the 260 to 1,100 hPa scale is close to meaningless on its own; the tendency graph is the instrument. A steady line is settled weather, and a line falling away sharply is the one worth acting on — that is the change alarm’s entire reason for existing, and it is worth leaving on when you are sleeping outside.

The thermometer: on your wrist it is measuring you

Every owner finds this out and the manual mentions it about once. Worn, the watch sits against a body holding itself at 37 degrees, so it reads somewhere between the air and your arm and is wrong by a wide margin. For a real air temperature take it off, hang it in shade, and give it twenty to thirty minutes to settle. Do that and the -10 to 60 degrees C range, resolved to a tenth, is genuinely useful. Leave it on your wrist and the tenth of a degree is false precision.

Setting it up: the one thing that trips everybody

The controls are logical once learned and baffling on day one, and there is a specific reason: setting the time is split across two different buttons rather than living in one menu. Owners routinely think the watch is stuck when they have simply only found half the settings. Expect to sit down with it once. After that it is muscle memory, and the payoff is that each sensor is one press away instead of buried in a menu tree.

Keeping it fed

Tough Solar means light, not sunbathing: ordinary daylight through a window keeps it topped up, and a full charge runs seven months in the dark, or twenty-five in power save. The practical failure mode is not the sensors, it is a watch that lives under a sleeve all winter. Give it a windowsill on days it is not on your wrist and the question never comes up.

And know what power save actually does before it frightens you: left in the dark, the display goes blank and the hands stop. A watch pulled out of a drawer with its hands frozen at some arbitrary time looks broken, gets shaken, and occasionally gets returned. It is working exactly as designed. Bring it into the light and it catches itself up on its own — there is an automatic hand home-position correction for precisely this. While you are there, one small oddity that is also not a fault: the minute hand advances every ten seconds rather than once a minute, so you will see it creep.