The Marine Electronics Hub
“I chastised the children for their lack of destructive ambition, handed out sticks and suggested they use the handhelds as drums, instead. They started whacking away.” Lenny Rudow’s Handheld Stress Test, published yesterday on Mad Mariner, has to be one of the funniest electronics articles ever. Plus…
My obsession with NMEA 2000 instruments continues. To better test and photograph them in real light conditions, I installed the array in a single, more serious panel. The weapon of choice was…
The SPOT satellite messenger is about to get more attractive to many boaters. Originally it wasn’t all that easy to share your tracking with friends and family; in fact, to do so you had to share your entire Spot account user name and password. But now Spot is beta testing a pretty sophisticated feature that enables Web sharing of both tracks and messages…
Milltech Marine is carrying a new AIS display of particular interest to power-sensitive offshore sailors. The Vesper Marine AIS WatchMate has a 5–inch “daylight readable” screen but purportedly only draws 1.2 watts average, 2.5 max. The $499 unit is not a receiver and does not do graphic target plotting, but…
I haven’t done one of these AIS miscellaneous entries since last June, but even then was wondering why the FCC hadn’t yet approved Class B! Now it seems like the U.S. marine safety community has gone into a state of depression about it…
If the Furuno FI-50 family featured yesterday are segmented LED old school—and the color all-in-ones can display data any which way (if the page designers get their butts in gear)—then Simrad’s IS20s are the middle school of N2K instruments.
Well, it’s one thing to contemplate testing a rack of N2K instruments, and quite another thing to do it. So many factors…oy! Today’s focus is Furuno’s unusual approach to calibration…
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Smaller, faster, cheaper! I’m wondering if some of the new automobile computers, like this Jensen NVX3000PC, wouldn’t work pretty nicely on a boat. You got your built-in GPS, 7” touch screen…
Speaking of good NMEA 2000 citizenship, the Lowrance LCX-113C HD in the lab is stellar. Press “Enter” on any of the devices listed above and you’ll get its details including live data. Click on the diagnostics tab and…
So I may be on semi vacation, and having a time, but I’m still looking forward to getting back to the lab where the network of NMEA instruments recently grew to include Furuno’s and Simrad’s latest. Check out the big picture here. I’ll be writing a comparative overview on these five brands soon after I get back, and I’m trying to sort out factors to check out. So far I’ve got:
