The Marine Electronics Hub
An MFD ought to be mounted where you can see it well, and reach it easily, and on many boats that may mean a flexible mount that can move with you, or with the sun. Like that new Navslide rig above, which looks like it will give great access to either the helmsman, or a navigator seated forward of him, irregardless of which side of the cockpit they’re most comfortable in. It’s a slick idea, and wait til you see the hardware quality…
Temporarily mounted on Gizmo’s scruffy masthead are two pretty neat LED flood lights. At right, facing aft, is a Lumitec Caprera, which purports to replace a 55 watt halogen while only using .9 amp and retailing for about $150 with a 22,000 hour output life. It’s sealed into a deeply powder-coated cast-aluminum housing, comes with the tilting stainless bracket shown (but not the jury-rig strap), and seems very solidly built. At left is an OceanLED Amphibian A6, which is mainly meant as an underwater light but somehow dissipates heat well enough through its polymer housing (and Tritonium lens) to be used anywhere. The bracket shown, which can cleverly fix the A6 any which way, is a new OceanLED accessory (though I can’t find it anywhere on their site). Amphibian A6’s draw .5 amp, claim a 40,000+ LED life, and retail for about $330. To my eyes, and to those of several Gizmots, the Lumitec is a brighter light…
A big thanks to both ScanStrut and SeaView for contributing mast mounts to the ongoing Gizmo radar testing program (will it ever end?). I found the SeaView SM-18-R to be as solid and easy to install as the ScanStrut. In fact, having just two mast feet instead of four might make the SeaView a little stronger and easier to align (though there may be a reason for the four-foot design I haven’t understood yet?) SeaView also offers the optional canting feet shown attached in the photo above, which made the Gizmo flying bridge mount possible…
Not surprisingly, there were fewer than normal applications for this
year’s MAATS Innovation Awards, but we judges were pleased to find some
strong entries, and selected a winner in every category (though we’re free not to, and often don’t). Also not surprising were the wins for Navionics Mobile 2.0 in Electronics and Revere/McMurdo’s FastFind 210 PLB in Safety. But I knew nothing of Master Lock’s PulseCode access management system, and was impressed…
That’s Eric Braitmayer, Imtra’s marketing guy, and he’s got lots to be happy about. The years of having to carefully explain the relative pros and cons of LED and halogen marine lighting are over. He’s confident that the Ventura PowerLED upper left is as bright as a similar size 20 watt halogen fixture while being fully dimable (without RFI issues), much cooler, and much, much more power efficient. In fact, Imtra is phasing out of halogen lighting altogether, and recently announced significantly increased LED sales despite the ‘downturn’. In other words, lots of boaters and boatbuilders apparently agree with Imtra that LED technology has advanced beyond the confusion area. Not that I would just go buy any old LED…
The U.K. company Scanstrut has been making all sorts of radome mounts and similar gear since 1986, and I know I’m not the only one who’s admired their smart and handsome engineering. I learned at the Miami show that they were working on a line of universal electronics pods, and today that line is not only official, but a few nice new design twists are revealed. For instance, the preview literature for the Deck Pod above — meant to mount MFDs up to 15″ on fly bridges and the like — illustrated its heavy duty silicone gasket and other features, but showed a mount that “only” swiveled. Look what they came up with for the finished product! Apparently you can just release that lever and position the pod however you’d like. I’ve long held that such flexibility can make displays much more useful in varying light conditions, and I’ve achieved that goal often with RAM mounts, but this looks like a truly elegant solution…
Dutch Panbo reader Eric Criens (thanks Eric!) reports that this good looking LED strip lighting on his Midget 26 was easily fashioned from a relatively inexpensive Ikea “Dioder” kit…
This is more than usually peripheral to “marine electronics” but these days everything electrical on boats is coming together, and, besides, I like it! Arid Bilge Systems makes what appear to be vacuum pumps that suck nearly every last drop out of areas…
Last winter, thanks to Lee Guite of East Boothbay, I tried some LED bulbs Lee used to replace the incandescent ones in the Aqua Signal nav lights aboard his Dulcinea. Lee got pretty carried away researching available replacement bulbs and the ones he finally chose were “flux” models from the LED Shop in Australia. In the photo above I was trying
Bebi Electronic’s LED lights most likely don’t employ the latest technology, like touch dimming, but there’s a lot to like about them…
