The Marine Electronics Hub
That’s Shakespeare Marine Electronics manager Bill Eastwood hamming it up with their just-announced inflatable VHF antennas at METS last November, and the grin is well deserved as the product had just won the DAME Award for the Safety category. In fact, I was the DAME judge who got to pull the cord to inflate the sample — worked like a charm — and I think we were all impressed with how rigid it became…
There are many reasons to like Victron solar panel charge controllers, but today I’ll laud the Bluetooth feature that comes with the relatively new SmartSolar models and could make sense in many electronic boat modules and sensors, I think…
Ben Stein is already in Miami working as an Innovations Award judge and I look forward to his reporting as I man the news desk here in Maine. Today, though, I’ll discuss some of the monitoring tools helping to keep Gizmo safe in winter conditions like the easterly gale that blew about ten inches of snow onto Camden last night…
When the Maine Cat MC 38 came out in 2016, the lightweight, low drag 38 design seemed perfect for ever-improving electric propulsion. So I’ve followed closely as builder/designer Dick Vermeulen pursued an electric solution, and there are now two interesting stories in progress: Maine Cat recently became the E-Tech distributor for North America and several MC 38 LS-E sailing cats will launch this spring with E-Tech outboards, hydro generation included.
Before heading from Chicago down to the Mobile, AL, I had two new holes drilled in the bottom of Have Another Day to install Garmin Panoptix PS-51 and Simrad Forward Scan forward-looking sonar transducers. Our travels down the debris-filled rivers revealed a potential problem with anything protruding below the hull, but it also showed how robustly these transducers are built.
I certainly agree with DownEast magazine’s choice for a top 10 iconic Maine image. Heck, I still remember relishing this photo of Captain Lincoln Colcord grinning his way around the Cape of Good Hope at the turn of the 19th century about 72 years later. It’s stirring stuff, and so maybe is that navigation gadget spinning off the miles on the hunky taffrail…
With the introduction of the Axiom MFD line Raymarine moved away from their proprietary SeaTalk NG cable/connector system and joined most other manufacturers offering standard DeviceNet cabling for NMEA 2000 networking. Now they’ve introduced a helpful line of adapters to make that transition easier, and the little adapters above can solve a lot of installation headaches…
Scheiber is a substantial French electronics company that provides sophisticated systems to large boatbuilders like Beneteau and Lagoon, but it’s now offering its lighting control technology in a retail kit form that means a local installer or DIY could use it for refits or custom builds. Moreover, the $350 Light Air Switch is distributed and supported in the U.S. by the crack team at Marinebeam, and what technology it is!
One of my METS show highlights was the Starlight LED Helming Guide introduced by Autonnic Research. While the concept is somewhat hard to grasp from ashore — even with an animation — I think it’s a great example of how electronics can be fashioned into a unique and useful tool that connects intuitively with the natural world of boating. While “a star to steer by” sounds lovely, I’ve observed many a helmsman…
LED lighting keeps getting better with higher quality light output, better fitting replacement bulbs, and lower costs. While new LED fixtures are a good choice on some boats — note how Gizmo got brighter and...
