Panbo

The Marine Electronics Hub

Category: Editors’ Blog

4

Editors' Blog / Navigation / Charts / When things go wrong...

Accidental grounding, familiarity breeds complacency

My 2018 cruising started with a trip straight up Lake Michigan’s Wisconsin coast bound for Manistique, a small town on Michigan’s upper peninsula.  We had something very rare, three consecutive days of flat water on Lake Michigan.  So we made the most of the conditions and ran all three of those days for a total of 300 nm at 9 kts.  We made it the length of the lake to Manistique without incident.  Unfortunately, we didn’t make it into Manistique harbor without incident.

13

Editors' Blog / Weather / When things go wrong...

Concerned about the Carolinas, searching for data

This great aerial image from Marinas.com shows the peaceful, safe harbor I so enjoyed while keeping Gizmo at both marinas. But New Bern got pummeled by hurricane Florence last night, and it’s hard to tell the amount of damage or how worse it may get. I find myself unable to think about much else, and while the quality and density of available information is amazing, I want more…

5

Editors' Blog / Panbo & misc. / The Trade

Two Bens, One great Panbo

Except for the possible name confusion, I’m very pleased to report that Ben Stein has become Panbo’s new Publisher while I get to focus entirely on the Edit side.  As you may know, “new Ben” has been serving as a Contributing Editor since January, we walked the Miami Show together, and it was “Ben S” who spearheaded the Panbo website rebuild that went live in late March. We’ve been working together closely…

14

Editors' Blog / Communications / Safety & SAR / AIS

USCG warns about LED lights interfering with VHF & AIS, wants test results

The USCG recently issued a Safety Alert about how LED lighting near VHF antennas can cause poor reception on attached radios, which of course includes AIS and DSC reception along with regular marine VHF audio channels. I’m surprised because I remember such problems coming up and being solved a decade ago, which was very early in the evolution of LED lighting…but…

23

Editors' Blog / Communications / AIS

Standard Horizon GX6000 bad and good news, plus new HX890 and HX40

What the heck? An AIS transceiver with a decent antenna up reasonably high can see other AIS transceivers fairly far away, but not 3,508 nautical miles! What’s actually illustrated here was a Standard Horizon GX6000 mistranslating AIS target positions into NMEA 2000, as strongly suggested by the photo below. But as bad as that glitch was, there’s already a firmware fix and the way the update operation works has further benefits.

11

Editors' Blog / When things go wrong... / Zany

Yacht campaigning along RI beaches hits rocks, politician blames NOAA

Yesterday was tough for Rhode Island independent gubernatorial candidate Joe Trillo. To me it already seemed like a poor idea to use his 65-foot yacht to campaign along the state’s summer beaches, especially with the huge banners and his “very, very big sound equipment” playing patriotic music. But then came the navigation issues…