Category: Navigation

So that’s the Garmin GMR 604 xHD open array radar I installed last May painting a crowded harbor on the screen of a GPSMap 7212 in late July.  Gizmo was headed southwest at the time — the GPS heading, or COG, is meaningless because she’s tied up to a float — and so you have to twist your brain a bit to see how well the radar is imaging the details of Jonesport’s Sawyer Cove, and hence that the long straight target at the upper left is the famously uncharted steel and concrete breakwater there.  And I think if you make the comparison you’ll agree that the true color target display really helps to understand what the radar is doing.  Those light blue and green returns at upper left, for instance, are almost certainly some sort of noise created the breakwater’s heft and hardness.  I could have turned the gain down to eliminate that noise, but then I might not have seen the light blue at lower left — which is an emerging mud flat, I think — and similarly difficult targets once I got underway.  True color returns is indeed my favorite feature of the xHD/7212 combination…

It’s about to be Thanksgiving here in the states, and — aside from the normal family stuff (which is huge) — I surely am thankful for being the custodian of a wonderful boat, for living in a beautiful corner of the oceans, and for getting to fool with some great technology.  Above is Gizmo’s lower helm, the Fall 2010 edition, and while there’s a lot here that I haven’t written about yet, I’m going to focus today on that little Garmin GPSMAP 740 on the chart table…

Rose Point Navigation showed off numerous new products and features during the NMEA Conference, as mentioned on Tuesday, but it make take a while for me, or anyone, to sort them all out.  This is especially true as the company has both a “relaxed” marketing style and a tendency to put product perfection over actual shipping dates.  For instance, a week after issuing a stack of press releases, there’s not yet a peep about them on Rose Point’s home page, but instead a link to a “sneak peak” (sic) at Coastal Explorer 2010, a product that will never actually be released!  What is new on the site is info about the heavily stripped down new version of CE called CE Express, which was announced last February in Miami but in fact is the first CE 2011-style software to ship.  Except that the Google Earth-like chart zoom slider seen above in the copy of Express I downloaded last week has already been replaced in the ongoing CE 2010 beta…

Geonav has been talking about a Fall U.S. roll out for some time, but now it’s turning out they have a lot more to show than the G12 and G10 MFDs introduced in Europe last year.  Seen in the photo above is an even newer model called the GIS10, and while it and the 12-inch model include most all the features seen online for the G series, they also support NMEA 2000, Gigabit Ethernet, and, yes, the Side Imaging technology pioneered by sister company Humminbird.  And how about those sexy MID 110 multifunction instrument displays (and the matching autopilot head)?