Seiko Astron just arrived, a review.

[Mitch]

Here is a watch I did not think I would own the original Seiko Astron. I like innovation in watches and of course Seiko claimed the Astron was the worlds first Solar GPS watch. They named it after the worlds first quartz watch. I always liked the watch when it was first issued but thought it was a bit expensive given the use I would make of it.

Sellers photo.





I got the watch from a seller in Japan I have bought from before. I occasionally look at what he is selling. He sells an eclectic bunch of watches he puts them all up for auction at one yen and so sells every watch he advertises, he sells about fifty plus watches every single day. They are a right mix from vintage Omega’s to fashion watches. I check occasionally as some times he is a bit careless with the description and the watch goes really cheaply.

Anyway, he had the watch advertised as a “Seiko Solar” watch with no mention of Astron. The watch was filthy, as a lot of the watches he sells are, he doesn’t seem to bother to even clean them and if they are battery watches and they are dead he describes them as ‘junk’, he doesn’t seem to ever bother trying to change the battery, just likes to sell in quantity it seems.

The watch was dead and you could see from the date it had run out of juice and reverted to its initial state. This is a potential problem but these Seiko Astrons have a good record of recovering, even from a fully discharged state, when given a good blast of sunlight. It is a risk, as getting hold of this particular Seiko rechargeable battery on the open market looks to be impossible. It is a CLB-2016 but particular to the watch, the same battery for a Casio GPS watch, but which would only fit the Casio, would be eighty Euros. I do though have some techniques for getting a fully discharged battery to start to receive a charge again, though I was hoping they would not be needed, assuming I won the watch.

Looking carefully past the dirt, there were no obvious signs of damage on the watch, there was a mark on the bezel at the five position but I knew this was almost certainly just dirt as the bezel is ceramic and not amenable to being scratched and so I bid and got the watch.

Here is the watch on arrival.








































































[url=https://flic.kr/p/2j2XVy6][/url



It was filthy and had a lot of micro scratches and swirls etc on the case which was dulling its appearance, Here is the watch after a good clean up and some initial polishing.





































































































































































It is not a perfect restoration polish but this will be worn and I am not looking for perfection as the watch will inevitably start to pick up minor marks again. The sides of the case, buttons etc, are mirror polished and only the very tops of the lugs are brushed together with the strap keeper.

The watch is large but the very soft, heavy duty silicone strap keeps it in place nicely. Seiko claimed that this silicone strap was four times stronger than usual silicone straps. It utilises a three part folding buckle for the strap, which again is very nicely made and finished. You certainly don’t want the strap to be breaking as I can see only one for sale on eBay and that is going for near £500!

This, being the original 7x52 Astron, is larger than subsequent models but I am only really interested in this one, as the first solar GPS watch and being used to G Shocks don’t find the size a problem in any way. The watch is 47 mm wide and 15 mm thick.

The watch is of very good quality, the deep set dial is very attractive and well finished, the hands and applied indices exude a bit of quality and the overall 3D look is interesting. I like this SAST-009 model the best of the series, the blue indices and second hand give it a bit extra style and interest.

It has a double AR coated sapphire crystal and this gives great clarity to the dial. It is 100m water resistant and has a screwdown crown, which I think is unnecessary on a watch of this type. Indeed it doesn’t really need a crown at all. The crown has no physical connection to the hands and is really just a means of enabling and switching the functions of the various buttons. Presumably another button could have done this a la G Shocks.

The watch was dead, so out under the sun it went. This thing has a huge capacity rechargeable cell, the CLB-2016, a cell designed for things like GPS watches, which need a battery to supply, for a short time, a thousand times more power than normal running when it is connecting to the various GPS satellites. These cells can, for a short time, discharge a high rate of power, compared to normal coin cell batteries.

I takes a long long time to charge. After two hours it started to tick at five second intervals and I could breath a sigh of relief as the cell was not dead and was charging but everything else was inactive. After 36 hours it resumed its one second tick but the charge indicator remained on ‘empty’ (this thing moves from ‘E’ to ‘F’ in two steps only) and the GPS function remained inactive. After eight days it moved off ‘empty’ and GPS became active. It synced up easily and also, because it had reset itself, it did the ‘leap second’ check and adjustment, something that takes nearly twenty minutes.

In a normal ‘time’ sync, it takes about five seconds to find a satellite and adjust the time. If you want to do a time zone adjustment this takes about thirty seconds as the watch has to find and connect to a number of satellites, to find your actual position, rather than just the one it needs for the time only. You can check for a successful sync and the watch’s second hand will point to ‘yes’ or ‘no’ and the indicator hand will point to ‘1’ or ‘4+’ to indicate, the sort of connection last made. As you can see here.............







You have to adjust for DST manually but this is done with just a couple of button presses. You can check the DST status of the watch with a simple button press.
The watch will automatically perform a time sync when it detects a strong light but remembers the last successful sync and will not seek to do one more than once a day.

It has a second time zone dial at six o’clock and this is set independently of the main time and can be set to the minute, so it can correctly show every single time zone in the world. It stays in sync with the main second hand.

The Astrons were pretty expensive for a quartz watch when first issued and still are. I think they ranged from about £1600 to £2500 for the base models in the UK, they are probably a bit cheaper relatively now. This watch dates from June 2013.

Seiko seems to have done very well with them though and they have sold plenty. There is a lot more competition in the GPS market now though, with Citizen and particularly Casio having a number of models. The Astrons have always been noted for the quality of their finishing and dial work though. Some of the new Casio’s can match this now, with the MRG line exceeding Seiko quality, the price reflect this though with those being more expensive than the Astron’s.

They seem to have sold much better in Japan rather than the West though. If you go on eBay, for this model, there are a dozen or so for sale and all but one are in Japan, with prices ranging from over £900 to £1500 to get them to the UK.

https://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?_f...ko+Astron+7x52


I would never have bought one for this sort of price though. I do think the first of a new line, i.e the world’s first solar GPS watch is probably worth a bit of a premium down the road and this model does seem to have held on to its value well.

Even so, though I like the idea of the watch and particularly like the look of this model, I would not have got the watch if the price had not been so good. Due to the poor description of the watch in the auction, I picked it up for less than £200, with then a few extra costs to get it to the UK.

I do like to run the hobby this way, as well as the mad satisfaction we get from collecting and owning stuff, I get a bit of an extra frisson from getting a good deal This one certainly is and I could sell it on for a fair profit if I was minded to do so. However, I am going to wear it and enjoy its ownership for quite some time, also having worked on it and put it into better condition is something that gives me a bit of extra satisfaction as well, it makes a bit more personal to me.

Here are quite a few wrist shots of the watch.
























































































































Any thoughts out there and have people got an Astron or two in their collection?



Mitch

[Christian]

I used to own one, model SAST025. Sold it on SC a while back...

https://forum.tz-uk.com/showthread.p...on-GPS-SAST025

Great watch and an absolute bargain for the price they were secondhand. I've got small wrists, it was a large watch but I think the case was coated titanium(?) so it wore very light/comfortably.

The only thing is that at full price, particularly when they had only just been released, I always felt that they were a bit OTT and you were paying for the technology concept rather then the functionality...a radio-wave Citizen Navihawk or a bluetooth G-Shock did the same thing much cheaper as it would be unlikely you'd end up somewhere you either didn't have your phone or outside the radio-wave signal. When the price fell and Citizen also started pushing out GPS offerings, they became a more viable alternative to radio-wave and bluetooth.

[manganr]

I have a an Astron. Came with the Ceramic and Ti bracelet but I prefer it on the rubber. Great watch and does what a watch should do. Infinitely and accurately.

Sent from my SM-N950F using Tapatalk

[DANH]

Thanks for the write up the watch looks great, and for the price you got it- amazing value, great find!

[mjc1216]

Great review...i spent ages deciding on an Astron or Citizen and decided on the Citizen.

[sish101]

That was well written and an interesting read. What sort of shipping costs are involved from Japan to the UK? (in addition to the 20% VAT)


Sent through the ether by diddling with radio waves

[jimmyt]

Enjoyed reading that, thanks for sharing!
Have you got a link for the seller so I can check out his wares or is that too secret 🤔

[Mitch]

That was well written and an interesting read. What sort of shipping costs are involved from Japan to the UK? (in addition to the 20% VAT)

The shipping cost from Japan was less than £20. The package contained two other watches though so the cost for the individual watch was only a third of this. I use an agent over there who combines purchases into one package.




Mitch