The Marine Electronics Hub
In a perfect world all countries would deploy a global standard protocol for cellular data, but in reality many have their own allocated frequency bands and system variants, nowhere is this more evident than the US and Canada, where systems are often incompatible with European and Asian counterparts. This has meant that for the shipping industry it has hitherto been difficult to come up with a global solution in one box.
My family and I just spent a year on the water. When we left, some members of our crew were hesitant about the whole idea, so I knew we needed many comforts of home, like an always-on (almost), always-available (almost) internet connection. This isn’t a simple or one-size-fits-all issue, and what follows is a primer on marine internet and the start of an article series…
I’ve selected the SureCall Fusion2Go cellular booster parts I’ll lug to the boat in North Carolina early Monday morning. In fact, I roughly tried the configuration in my basement shop yesterday, and the results were quite promising…
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…
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...
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…
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...
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…
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…
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…
