The Marine Technology Hub
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:
I’ve actually been testing Lowrance’s XOG for months now, and have become quite a fan. Primarily it’s a touch screen car navigator with voice directions and two gigs worth of Navteq street maps (U.S. and Canada) and three plus million POI’s built-in. But it’s also splash proof and can display all sorts of Lowrance and Navionics cartography on preprogrammed SD cards, or
I didn’t plan to go off line on the occasion of Panbo’s third birthday, but, man, am I! I’m posting this entry using the free WiFi at the Great Machipongo Clam Shack (excellent), and a couple of my fingers aren’t at 100% typing condition due to a header I took off a bicycle yesterday…
I guess this sort of thing was inevitable, thanks to FCC recalcitrance, but still it’s a sad sale for all but a few. Apparently PortVision, an interesting U.S.-based commercial marine information service, has concluded that the FCC is not about to allow Class B AIS anytime soon, and is liquidating its inventory of SRT transponders. You may recall that…
We interrupt Panbo’s regular NMEA 2000 programming for some video side experiments. Seen above is what you get if you plug a DVD player into a Garmin 5212’s RCA “video in” port. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a multifunction display that could show video truly full screen, but neither have I seen one that used quite as little of the available screen as this. On the other hand…
While the extreme N2K cable mixing and daisy chaining shown yesterday did seem to work OK in lab conditions, here’s a smarter approach for a serious boat system (bigger here). The main change is…
The Panbo lab is a good place to push things in ways a smart installer never would; in other words, do not try this—bigger picture—on your boat! What I did here was to purposely break about every NMEA 2000 rule I could…
Check out the sensor array outside the lab. That’s not today—though it’s snowing just north of me now, raining cold and mean here—but it was taken recently, and the gear was similarly abused often during this most memorable Maine winter. Tactick, Maretron, Airmar, and ACR all get credit for standing up to harsh elements, even working OK in conditions like this. And note…
There’s been a slight change in the GPS satellite system and it’s messing up some older Northstar sets—i.e. certain 941, 951, 952, 961, and 962 Navigators, depending on their software version. Northstar has a tech bulletin online, along with…
Well, I’ll be darned. Raymarine’s stock jumped today, the company stated that “it has received a preliminary approach which may or may not lead to an offer being made for the company,’ and…
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