Simrad Remote, a NMEA 2000 surprise
It made sense to me that Simrad’s WR20 RemoteCommander shared an innovation award with the Northstar 8000i at the Miami boat show. It uses Bluetooth to wirelessly connect (“up to” 300’, as they say) with...
Monthly Archive: March 2006
Hotbox, a cell-powered WiFi hotspot
Inside a Hotbox is a cellular highspeed data card—EVDO, Edge, whatever you want. The box converts the cellular connection into a local WiFi hotspot. The company that makes it has equipped the particular model above with an M-Tec...
More LowranceNet, and a NMEA 2000 ‘gotcha’
In the photo above, taken on an Etec/Lowrance demo boat in Miami, I’m setting up a “Custom Gauges” window, and this particular screen is showing me some of the data available on the NMEA 2000 (LowranceNet) bus, specifically what’s...
LowranceNet 2, good news for NMEA 2000
Well, it was odd really; the very day I blogged about how nothing seemed to be happening with NMEA 2000 cabling issues and how well a proprietary LowranceNet backbone worked with a standard NMEA 2000 backbone...
Lowrance’s Fish-Lo-K-Tor, the good old days?
It’s going to be short today, as these pictures speak for themselves. They probably date from the early 60’s, though even Lowrance (who provided them) doesn’t seem sure. But that’s about when the company’s...
New Furuno fishfinders, DSP and stylin
Furuno has two new fishfinders, the FCV585 and FCV620, that seem interesting. For one thing, better seen in a big picture, they are styled more sleekly than normal Furuno gear. More important perhaps, they incorporate Digital Signal Processing (here’s Chuck Husick...
Ultra Mobile PC (UMPC), a nice mini plotter?
Panbo correspondant Jeff Siegel is excited about the nautical possibilities of this new PC architecture called UMPC, hyped recently as Origami, and I can see why. I got excited when the first tablet PCs came out, until I realized that you...
X-keys Stick, an interesting PC/Mac nav accessory
As noted yesterday, the owner/designer of the dual PC helm setup has found a nifty HID (Human Interface Device) that I’d never seen before (bigger here, and set up for Coastal Explorer). The X-keys Stick USB...
Another trawler, PC centric for sure
This is the pilot house of a Nordic Tug 37 belonging to a Panbo reader in the state of Washington. It’s his very first boat! But he did spent an unusual amount of time learning navigation...
Boat dreams, sometimes don’t work out
“In the foreground is a Furuno 1731MKIII radar, then behind it is a Garmin GPS162 usually left in a large map view, then there is the primary Simrad CP32 GPS which is left in...
