Spotty Performance and Cryptic Interface Hold back an Otherwise Great Device

There's a lot to love about this instrument: when it's working properly it can gather accurate depth profiles with incredible speed, it (mostly) connects easily to the associated computer program to visualize the profiles of a variety of factors, and it's suitably rugged for something routinely dropped off the side of a boat. However, the interface guiding your runs is often difficult to navigate (especially for students) and the directions for starting a run can be unclear. There's just something unintuitive about it that often stumps our users. On top of that, I have had more notes of "this doesn't work" on this instrument than any other in our field collection. Even with fully charged batteries, the screen can fail to turn on, then suddenly work after a few tries. We have regularly deployed 4 of these CTDs for at least 10 years, and the performance issues crop up pretty regularly. I think they're a great research and teaching tool if you learn how to use them. If you don't have a lot of one-time users, I suspect you won't see the kinds of problems our department does.