The Marine Electronics Hub
I’m exhausted maties, but thought you might enjoy this pic of the new Garmin GMI 10, reported on a bit this morning. Garmin now has more detail here, and press releases on all the other new kit here. I’ll try to add more about my imressions in the am.
Ben Ellison
Panbo editor, publisher & chief bottlewasher from 4/2005 until 8/2018, and now pleased to have Ben Stein as a very able publisher, webmaster, and editing colleague. Please don't regard him as an "expert"; he's getting quite old and thinks that "fadiddling fumble-putz" is a more accurate description.
It looks like 2008 may finally be the year of N2K!
Garmin seems to freely intermix the usage of NMEA 2000 and Garmin Marine Network. Does all this new gear us standard N2K connectors, or something that is Garmin proprietary?
Very sexy looking! The shadows give an impressive raised / 3D look.
The instant I saw the Raymarine ST70 I was a fan of having a generic display rather than specialized displays for each sensor.
Kudo’s to Garmin for doing the same, but at a price point that makes me feel they are passing along the manufacturing savings from having a single common display.
Looks very nice, but what the heck is “GPS speed?” What was wrong with “speed over ground?”
Does any electronic compass, gps, or plotter allow for a user defined deviation input?
Way to go Garmin! I swear I didn’t know it was coming when I complained in a Panbo entry two days ago that there are too many buttons on the Simrad AP24 (thirteen), and that my ideal autopilot had 6 buttons (with advanced functions configured from soft keys or accessible via the chartplotter menus)
Garmin has delivered, in fact they have just 5 buttons with soft keys for the advanced functions.
As I wrote two days ago, my ideal autopilot head has either a rotary knob (and 2 buttons), or six buttons [auto/standby -10 -1 +1 +10, and a button to turn the display into a depth or speed indicator instead]. A special indent on the -1 and +1 buttons would be nice. With six buttons, my helmsperson can learn it in about 2 minutes, and with raised idents, I can reach over from in front of the wheel, find the right buttons [ -10 -1 +1 +10], and press them blind.
With 5 buttons, instead of 6, I hope the +/- 10 function can be done well. Ben wrote that a demo unit has the +/- 10 feature achieved by holding down a button. That’s not going to be real helpful at times when you want to press the buttons blind, or jam the +/-10 button three times quick in succession, or even 9 times (tack !).
I can think of other ways you can achieve a good interface with five buttons with the three of them being softkeys, but making it so that you can do this in the blind … I got to give that some thought.
With the product still in development, maybe they will ask for my opinion. I would hate to see a 6th button, if it can be done with five.
Garmin, the autopilot aside, how about an advanced model of the GMI 10 that would allow us to build custom readouts with our PC’s using flash technology and loading the flash files via USB dongles, allow a few to be in memory at the same time that the user can choose from ? Your product could become an amature sailboat racer’s dream!
Power consumption?
I like the idea of these color graphical displays, but they must take way more power than fixed LCDs. That pretty much rules them out for me.
Richard, I don’t know the specs, but apparently these instruments use so much power in full bright mode that Garmin decided not to power them off the N2K bus. Instead there’s a separate power bus that looks a lot like N2K cabling. But they do seem very bright.
The real advantage to using this new graphical interface is that is accepts both NMEA0183 and NMEA2000 information. So as I understand it my existing garmin network with a 3010C display can gateway into this GMI10 display and provide depth, GPS, heading and other information via the NMEA0183 output of the GPSMAP 3010C. This saves me from having to buy all new NMEA devices and sensors. With my new NMEA2000 outbords I have a complete fuel management system using my existing GPS. Just need to add a fuel tank sensor, fuel flow sensors are already standard in the new outboards and available via the outboards NMEA200 interface. Now the GMI10 can also provide all the vital outboard information.
Please Santa, let Garmin have a nice analog-like wind display, so my world will be complete!