The Marine Electronics Hub
That’s a Panasonic Toughbook MDWD I tested for PMY back in early 2003, and mentioned here when Nobeltec began selling it as a navigation accessory. It came with a simple plastic stylus—nice for, say, setting a waypoint bang on a buoy—but it could also be fingered…
The product image may be a little fruity—HP calls it the “perfect kitchen computer”—but I think this TouchSmart IQ770 might make one heck of a boat computer…
Yesterday I got to spend a few hours on a Navionics test boat tooling around Bass River, Cape Cod (unfortunately damnable cars and planes were also involved in the trip). A few of us boating writers got to fool with eight chart plotters, and see first hand what Navionics is up to for 2008 (very cool, but I can’t write about it just yet). Another highlight…
Type my zip code into the Sprint coverage map and you’ll get the above. The green color indicates some level of service, but the little dots mean “Signal strength information unavailable.” Well, when…
As suggested yesterday, boaters who already have Globalstar phones—or are trying to decide between its lower rates and faster data versus Iridium’s greater reliability and range—want to know when Globalstar will fix the amplifier problems that have plagued duplex service over the last year or so. One bit of news is…
When I sailed from Bermuda to Maine in June, the happy electronics story was testing a Class B AIS. But there were other stories, like getting to try Iridium and Globalstar satellite phones side by side. One reason I’ve been slow with it is that neither phone seemed a real winner. In fact, that’s Vision of Johanna’s owner Bill Strassberg expressing our general “throw them both overboard” feelings…
So the AnyTrack pitch is that the little GPS-100 above is “perfect” for locating stolen boats or vehicles, or tracking something or someone precious. The interesting technology involved is…
I’ve been intermittently testing this Magellan Crossover for months now, and the fact I haven’t mentioned it here is a sign of my ambiguous feelings about it. The proposition—an All-in-One (AIO) touch screen Personal Navigation Device (PND)—is really seductive…
I don’t think I’ll be offered a job in any department at Lyman-Morse any time soon, but check out how I turned a milk crate and some wood scraps into Annie G’s new electronics test station…
Do these new ST70 instrument and autopilot displays (bigger here) look beautiful or what? The problem is…
