The Marine Electronics Hub
I’m getting Have Another Day ready for a pretty major upgrade from her current flooded lead-acid GC2 golf cart batteries to a MasterVolt LiFePo4 lithium iron house bank. There were a few surprises along...
Frank Emnett, Maretron’s Vice President of Monitoring and Control Software, and I sit down to discuss MPower. MPower is Maretron’s digital switching platform and it’s scheduled to be available in mid-February for both new...
Dan Harper, Siren Marine’s founder and CEO, joined me to talk about the Siren 3 Pro boat monitoring system. Siren’s latest boat monitoring products bring built-in NMEA 2000, bi-directional wireless sensors, 4G LTE communications,...
The product name “OSCAR” is an acronym for the very valuable, though challenging, collision avoidance work attempted by the multi-camera masthead pod above, along with its processing unit and display apps. Which is Optical System Cognition And Ranging. But the developers also anticipated the usage I’ve noticed in videos showing extreme offshore racing sailors using the system: The skippers tend to call the system “Oscar” like he’s an extra crewman they’re really glad to have on board…
Great to see an AIS MOB device helping with the amazing rescue of Vendée Globe solo racer Kevin Escoffier early this morning (Universal Time). At 14:00 UTC yesterday afternoon, he’d had to transition from surfing his foiling IMOCA 60 PRB at 25+ knots in 10-13 foot seas about 840 miles southwest of Cape Town — 3rd in what was then a 32-boat fleet — to grabbing a survival suit and jumping into his liferaft, all in about two minutes. Yike!…
Our most recent podcast episode is a little different. Instead of sitting down with a product representative, I sat down with my colleague and mentor Ben Ellison. When I first started in the marine...
Working from boat, cabin, RV, or wherever you find yourself is so very 2020, but for most of us, that takes internet connectivity. Unfortunately, staying online via a cellular connection has gotten increasingly harder. I’m baffled about why the year of nomadic work is also the year that carriers have made it so very difficult, but what follows is an update on what I’ve done historically, what’s stopped working recently, and how I’m trying to remedy the situation.
Episode 2 of the Panbo Podcast is available. I sat down with Chris Ponnwitz from Mack Boring to talk about ePropulsion’s line of electric motors and batteries. The timing is good because Ben E....
I’m clearly not the only person who can barely focus on anything beyond the endless onslaught of bad news — 2020! — and thus I relish the opportunity to deliver even a tiny slice of the good stuff: There really is a marine toilet paper that’s reasonably nice to use while also dissolving so well that it may never clog your boat’s head. And the fact that I used almost 16 rolls of a tissue that fails on both counts suggests…
A high-quality combination VHF and AIS antenna was on Gizmo’s shopping list this summer, even though I knew that it’s challenging to do both really well. The USCG Navigation Center spectrum diagram above tells the story (as does their detailed U.S. VHF Channel list): The marine VHF audio channels cluster around 157 MHz while the two main AIS channels are up at 162 MHz. That’s why dedicated VHF and AIS antennas are optimized differently…
