Be The Jam

This is the newer version of the headlamp that I use, mine has the battery pack attached to the back of the head rather than, as here, dangling down. This change has been made to allow the wearer to keep the batteries warm and so get longer use from them.

I bought one of these originally because the specifications in terms of battery life and brightness of light far exceeded any others. The light can be used at one of three levels of brightness which can be handy. A flip up screen in front of the LED allows the torch like spotlight to be refracted and so give a wider field of vision. This does reduce the limit of operational light but if you need to look at something further away simply flip the screen down and you have a spotlight again.

In an emergency set the thing to flash mode and hope someone sees it.

Downside? I have had mine for months and it has been the only source of light that I have had for most of that so it has had a lot of use. Last week it started to turn itself off with startling regularity, this can be quite annoying. Upon further investigation I found that the cable from the light reaches the battery pack has broken so unless the cable happens to be in the right place the light does not work. I emailed Petzl about this and they said they hadn't heard of this problem before but offered to fix it if the problem was due to a fault with the headlamp rather than something that arose through misuse. I decided to fix it myself, partly as I wanted to see how easy it is to fix so that I know if it can be fixed in the jungle and partly because I think the cable probably broke as a result of my wearing it to read in bed.

I will probably take one of these to the jungle with me but the chap at Petzl did say the Petzl Zoom might be better for me as it can be taken apart and maintained.