Monthly Archive: May 2009
These are big times in the small world of global satellite communications for medium size boats! Yesterday Inmarsat demoed Fleet Broadband 150 hardware and service in Miami (my people were there, and even called...
Lucky me, I have an amazingly bright and progressive plumber who is also a seriously addicted boater, and sometimes we barter our respective skills. Which is how I found myself tuning up and updating his old GPSMap 276C last week. I was amazed to discover that Garmin’s latest update for it was just released on March 19; it’s a minor update, to be sure, but this unit has been around since 2004 (when I gave it a prize). And so I planned an entry complimenting Garmin on its perfectionistic persistence…but that was before I saw the just-released 5.0 software for the networkable 4- and 5000 series. Wow…
There are numerous cable labelling devices and styles, as folks have commented about in the Gizmo schematics entry and the systems forensics saltwater pathogens entry (;-). I even have a low-end, but decent Dymo LetraTag Plus whose tape labels can be made work okay on cables. But last week I noticed, and bought, this newish Dymo Rhino 101, which can be used with self laminating cable labels. I like it; it’s simple, light, and fast, and no batteries are required.
I plan to thoroughly check out the sample Lowrance HDS-10 I recently received, and will probably write about it a lot too. It marks not only a major MFD refresh for Lowrance, but also,...
This graph is a thermal sensor manufacturer’s dream — and was, in fact, created by the marketing department at FLIR — but, hey, that’s us way over to the right. I’d love to see...
I have no idea why Bob Congdon, former U.S. Sales Manager for B&G, is now working for Euro Marine Trading, the U.S. distributor for NKE…and I question the ravings at Sailing Anarchy on the...
Thanks to Sandy Daugherty over on the Forums, I now know that JRC has introduced a VHF radio series that can easily make direct DSC calls to AIS targets. They are most definitely big ship radios (see diagram below), and they do AIS calling in a way I hadn’t anticipated, but still…