Winegard enters marine market
Winegard, a 64-year-old manufacturer of antenna products, has entered the marine market with three products. Two are broadcast television antennas, one the familiar indoor flexible, flat panel type, and the other…
Category: Communications
Digital Yacht 4G Connect, with WiFi router and Alexa
This Digital Yacht 4G Connect was impressively demonstrated at the Miami show. The standard model shown uses indoor MIMO antennas to connect with cellular data services, then WiFi and/or Ethernet to make the link...
Smörgåsboat 2: More tasty test electronics southbound on Gizmo
The jury is still out. Brian Lind may have written a blushingly laudatory profile of Panbo and me for PassageMaker magazine — and you can now check out “Who is Ben Ellison?” online — but I agree with regular readers who may rightfully doubt my ‘authoritative’ ‘expertise’! This site is not the “arbitrator of marine electronics” — no such thing exists — and evidence is building that I’ve become a bumbling old boat guy barely in command of all the gear he’s installed, plus very darn slow to write about it…
Smörgåsboat: The tasty testing buffet installed on Gizmo for 2017
While I do think that Gizmo offers a bountiful spread of delicious marine electronics these days, a more serious title for this entry might read: “Guilt: All the darn gear I’ve borrowed but haven’t...
Garmin inReach Explorer+, armchair transatlantics & hands on
A big kick in my small life is seeing a technology I champion do well (especially when it involves a small company in Maine). I became a DeLorme inReach fanboy before it even shipped, and a succession of models have not let me down over thousands of testing hours. And I believe that the Explorer+ jointly developed with new owner Garmin is the best yet, based on personal experience and also on observing one serve well over thousands of transatlantic miles aboard S/V Lunacy (above). However, I also recently watched one Panbo reader suffer a very close call with inReach customer support…
Glomex USA, Shakespeare and the search for better antenna cabling systems
Recently I struggled installing a typical marine antenna with its included cable and annoying 0.71-inch (18 mm) diameter PL-259 connector. I could have cut the coax, run the cable, and attached a new PL-259, but I’m not sure that any human can install a cable connector as well as a machine, and certainly not me. That’s why it’s nice that Glomex now offers a variety of antennas and machine-made cables that use 0.35-inch (9mm) FME connectors. But for U.S. boaters, the Glomex news is better still…
SkyMate Mazu/mSeries all-in-one Iridium sat comms & Si-Tex NavStar Android MFD
It was good to see SkyMate return to the Miami Boat Show after years focused on commercial fishing, and the company clearly has not lost its touch at squeezing lots of easy utility out of skinny-band satellite communications. Its new Mazu/mSeries marine system promises surprisingly full-featured weather and email using Iridium’s least expensive service, plus texting, SOS, navigation and (optional) off-boat monitoring. And, just around the corner in the Si-Tex booth, I saw a very interesting Android-based touchscreen NavStar MFD nicely interfacing with SkyMate’s existing communications system…
New Garmin: Fantom radomes & Panoptix thru-hull FLS, plus radios & “budget” MFDs
Were you hoping that Garmin would bring its Fantom solid-state radar technology down to radome size, including the Doppler-assisted target motion highlighting they call MotionScope? How about two sizes, 18 and 24 inch? Or maybe you’re a Garmin owning cruiser jealous of Simrad or B&G users with ForwardScan forward looking sonar? That’s also taken care of, sort of. And these are just two highlights of all the new products Garmin announced today, many of which will ship soon…
Lauderdale ‘lectronics: sensors, sats, cams, boats, ROVs and ?
The Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show (FLIBS) has become an enormous event, and I would have a hard time covering all the interesting electronics-related exhibits even if I actually motivated my lazy old butt out of Maine this week. But I do have the goods on one important set of new products (that I can share tomorrow), and I’ve also got some ideas about booths and docks to visit that some of you might enjoy and perhaps even report back about…
Remote Boat Monitoring: here comes Navico GoFree Vessel/Track and Siren Marine MTC
While off-boat monitoring was already getting better and more competitive, finally one of the big four marine electronics brands is about to join the fray. Navico’s GoFree Connected Vessel concept is not just important because it will be marketed and serviced worldwide, but also because the development team took the time to think out a truly comprehensive system that can potentially serve a wide variety of boaters in multiple ways. Meanwhile team Siren Marine has been building on their years of remote monitoring, tracking and control experience and will soon announce a series of second-generation MTC products that sound exciting. This entry will take a preliminary look at both these systems and I’ll soon share testing results on two more…
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