Garmin Instinct (First Generation)
A K9 handler with a police department in the northwest suburbs of Chicago, just back from a stroll with his partner. The watch was a gift from his wife, more than four years ago, and it has been with him through thick and thin since. Military deployments overseas in the Middle East. Everyday patrol on the street as a police officer. Now the K9 unit. His partner, K9 Nova, is a human scent specific trailing K9, single purpose. Every trail they run gets logged. "I constantly log our trails utilizing this watch, which allows us to improve our trade day after day," he writes. Garmin Instinct, first generation. A gift that became a training log. Tempus Est Potentia.
Intel Report
Garmin Instinct, First Generation
The first Instinct arrived in 2018 with a simple pitch: a GPS watch built like field gear. The case is fiber reinforced polymer, constructed to U.S. military standard 810 for thermal, shock and water resistance, and rated to 100 meters. The display is a memory in pixel LCD, always on, no touchscreen, five buttons, the kind of interface that works with gloves on and does not care about sunlight.
Inside is the full navigation stack: GPS, GLONASS and Galileo, a 3 axis compass and a barometric altimeter, with up to 14 days of battery in smartwatch mode and up to 40 hours in UltraTrac. It became the gateway Garmin for people who wanted the tracking without the fragility.
Four years of deployments, patrol shifts and K9 trails is the kind of service life it was built for.