Svalbard - History, Models and Owners' Reviews

The HX11 is a stainless steel (sapphire crystal) watch featuring a retrograde minute and jumping hour display on a quartz movement, all for less than €180. Its 44 mm diameter allows it to fit a wrist larger than 18 cm, and its thickness is reasonable at 13 mm. It's not a favorite watch for me, but I really wanted to try out these complications, and I'm satisfied. Note that the finish is fully polished. So, I brushed the upper part of the case to give it a more discreet appearance. See photos. Very good value for money.

There are a lot of ways to split the day in two, like your electricity supplier, but the two parts, peak hours and off-peak hours are far from equal, or like the alarm clock that displays AM/PM but it is not very practical, we never greet people "good morning!", or "good afternoon!" depending on this display. On the other hand, a question of protocol arises, how do you know if you should say good morning or good evening? Relying on the sun is not necessarily a good solution, there are days when it is impossible to see it, days when daylight disappears in the middle of the afternoon, or even earlier, as we get closer to the polar circle. Hence the idea of splitting the day into two equal parts of 12 hours, a dark part until 6 a.m., a white part, until 6 p.m. Conventionally white is at the top, when the sun is high in the sky and black at the bottom, when the sun passes below the horizon line and lights up the other side of the earth. I had never bought an automatic Svalbard watch before, it is thicker than the quartz watches I have bought so far (12.85mm) but the glass is flat and it works. This watch is powered by a Seiko NH34A automatic movement, there is nothing to complain about. It is visible because of the transparent case back, but there is no particular decoration on the oscillating weight. The question I ask myself when wearing this watch on a daily basis is why there is no Lume on the hands which are nevertheless suitable for it. They have a large white coating which makes them very visible in the night part, but depending on the lighting conditions there may be a readability problem in the day part. Why? modern watches tend to spread luminescent coating everywhere, here it would be logical and useful. It may be to represent the silence of the far north, or the silence of space, a sort of reference to the song Vladimir Vissotsky, on white silence, https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=ucx65L0c4ak. The absence of luminescence is a way of representing silence. The Seiko movement makes very little noise, it is not a particularly pleasant sound, but it is almost inaudible on this watch, so it is not that which will break the silence. The other music that this watch can make you think of is the soundtrack of the film March of the Penguins by Emilie Simon. The Antarctic region and the black and white of the emperor penguins definitely make you think of this two-tone dial. Adjectives: polar, extreme, dual, refined, two-tone, yin yang

I dreamed of the Breitling Navitimer Cosmonaute. Found a Svalbard watch with a 24-hour dial on the web. Sold out edition. Contacted their German agent. Bought it in early December. It stopped within a week. Sent it back. Returned it 2 months later. Works for 3 days. Stops. Definitely stopped for over a week. Radio silence from Svalbard and my seller.