The Marine Electronics Hub
I got the test Garmin 545s and a new Raymarine A60 installed on Gizmo and took a test run around my local Lake Megunticook. I don’t think Navionics, Garmin, or any one else has electronic charts for this particular lake—or many lakes in Maine for that matter—so the plotter functions were pretty pointless. But I did get a taste of both their dual-frequency fishfinders…
Cool. Not only has Lowrance switched to standard style N2K screw connectors, but they’ve also added the nifty Double T fitting seen above, and they seem to be emphasizing NMEA 2000’s name and multi-manufacturer compatibility over “LowranceNet” in their new marketing…
So somehow when I was actually plotting Spirit of Bermuda’s Class B AIS output in Hamilton Harbor my screen shots failed to save. But I still have the marks I made every time its plot updated and you can sort of see the jumping bean effect that results from Class B’s 30 second update rate…
My latest PMY electronics column, “Connected Cruising”, is now online and here’s a full size version of the screen shot I used to illustrate a successful online cell phone venture using Motorola’s Phone Tools software. A PMY forum comment from Robert Stronger adds some interesting detail to this story:
Despite indications that I only think about AIS, I do have some other subjects! A big one recently has been Lyman-Morse Boatbuilding. This morning I just finished up a PMY Sept. feature about the company’s woodworking department—now 50 crafts-people strong, and doing phenomenal work—and I’m researching an eventual electronics column about Electra, which began with an early June trail run. What a boat!…
What luck that I got to monitor another active Class B transponder while testing one myself. As you can see above, and bigger in my first Nauticast B post, ACR’s included “Link2AIS Class-B” software identified the training ship Spirit of Bermuda’s AIS as a B model. Coastal Explorer did not make this distinction but it did decipher Spirit’s name and other “static” information. As mentioned in my one offshore post, none of the five ships I spoke with were getting our name on their Class A AIS displays…
