The Marine Electronics Hub
I recently judged the Innovation Awards at the International Boat Builders’ Exposition (IBEX) and we selected the new Balmar SG200 battery monitor as the winner of the electrical products category. The SG200 combines the goodness of the highly regarded original Smartgauge with a shunt to deliver a more complete picture of what your batteries are doing…
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.
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…
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…
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…
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.
Have Another Day’s cruising season began in earnest about a month ago and with it came the need for a new planning and underway app. As you may know from my ActiveCaptain Community app...
Aha! The tar-smeared GPS antenna in the bow of the mighty 115-foot replica Viking ship Draken was not a surprise. Live maritime historical research requires modern aids by regulation and common sense. And, holy Leif Erikson, what…
A US versus EU trade war cartoon courtesy of the China Daily seems like a fit illustration of the Navico “2018 Price adjustment warning” recently sent out to dealers (one of whom shared it with...
The sad looking picture above is the back of Have Another Day’s 240v AC panel. Though it doesn’t look good here, it was scarier looking when I first opened the panel the dull grey stud...
