Every skydive comes down to one decision made at the right altitude, and an altimeter is the instrument that tells you when to make it. For students drilling the cadence of "check, peel, punch" and for licensed jumpers building wingsuit, freefly, or canopy currency, the device on your wrist (or in your helmet) is a piece of safety equipment first and a gadget second. The market splits into three jobs: visual altimeters you read at a glance, analog needles or digital displays, audibles that beep break-off and pull alerts into your ear, and the newer GPS loggers that record the whole skydive. Most experienced jumpers eventually own both a visual and an audible, because they do genuinely different things and an audible should never replace an active altitude check.
The good news is that this is a mature, slow-moving category dominated by two trusted manufacturers, Larsen & Brusgaard (L&B) of Denmark and Alti-2 of the United States, plus a handful of newer entrants like AON2, Deep & Steep, and Dekunu pushing on price and features. The bad news is that almost none of it shows up usefully on Amazon; this is specialty gear sold through dropzone pro shops and skydiving retailers such as ChutingStar, SkydiveShop, and Skydive Store. That's exactly why a guide like this is worth reading: prices run from roughly $200 for a no-frills analog or audible up to $520-plus for a GPS data recorder, and the right pick depends far more on your discipline and license stage than on spending the most money.
This guide spans that full spectrum. We cover the analog wrist dial that most first-jump courses still issue, the compact digital that has become the default for thousands of jumpers, the audibles that handle freefall and canopy alerts, and the GPS-logging flagship for the data-obsessed. Wherever you are in your progression, there is a sensible, currently-available answer here.
