New skydiving technology created by Skydive Santa Barbara instructor

Innovation is abundant at Skydive Santa Barbara! We sat down with SSB instructor Casey Mongoven to discuss his newly-released altimeters, and here’s the scoop.

Skydive Santa Barbara tandem instructor, Casey Mongoven (D-33972), founded Freefall Data Systems LLC (FDS) in Lompoc, California. Casey creates and designs all hardware and software for FDS products – most recently two skydiving altimeters, the SonoAlti and ColorAlti.

“With skydiving altimeter technology, I recognized an apparent gap in the market,” said creator Casey Mongoven. “SonoAlti and ColorAlti make skydiving altimeters more user friendly, allowing skydivers to access functionality through their smartphone – something not previously available through existing altimeters. In addition, ColorAlti provides a feature for continuous and immediate feedback of a skydiver’s altitude through the hue of a light in your peripheral vision, an extra layer of safety.”

FDS Product Highlights

SonoAlti is an audible altimeter with an abundance of features, but primarily designed for the user interface, an iOS or Android app. The SonoAlti allows jumpers to access their audible altimeter settings through their smartphone, something that many skydivers struggle with – remembering how to set, or where settings are located. The altimeter is always on, and has a rechargeable lithium polymer battery (via USB cable, included) with a life of around 200 jumps, or three months. The SonoAlti has up to 8 freefall, canopy, and ascent alarms with 64 different alarm sounds.

ColorAlti isn’t an audible altimeter, but extremely flexible and customizable visual altimeter providing constant altitude awareness in your peripheral vision. Also controlled by an iOS and Android app-based user interface, ColorAlti’s patent-pending technology delivers continuous and immediate feedback of your altitude through an LED light. LED brightness and saturation can be adjusted, and there are 256 different hues to choose from. ColorAlti has a bendable gooseneck on the LED light that stays in place even at very high freefall speeds. ColorAlti has up to 8 freefall, canopy and ascent alerts.

Both altimeters log number of jumps, canopy and freefall time, and provide altitude and vertical speed graphs of your last skydive.

In addition, both altimeters have settings:

• • For travelers — Adjusts automatically to local elevation
  • For wingsuiters — Wingsuit mode provides a more accurate assessment flight time and lowers the threshold of what is considered freefall from 80 mph to 20 mph
  • For swoopers — Swoop mode makes certain that all freefall alarms are turned off below 1,500 feet and increases the threshold of what is considered freefall from 80 mph to 100 mph
  • For high altitude jumpers — Adjustable volume for each alarm up to ~30,000 feet

Want to know more about Freefall Data Systems? You can visit FDS on Facebook, or follow @FreefallDataSystems on Twitter here.

Blue Skies,

– The Skydive Santa Barbara Team