Category: Navigation

I sort of knew that “shootout” was a poor word choice — implying the certainty of corpses and so forth — and I’m officially dropping it from the Panbo title vocabulary; it’s too hard to be that certain!  A glaring example was omitting Furuno tide graphs from the MFD tide “shootout”; I knew better, really, but somehow briefly lumped tides and currents into the POI info that’s so far missing from the NavNet 3D charts (but won’t be once Active Captain and C-Map data is supported).  In fact, you just click and spin the RotoKey to Tide Graph, click again, and you get the nice screen seen above of the nearest prediction station.  But it’s not perfect, and when it comes to current predictions, it looks like none of the MFDs are…

I may regret that title eventually, though I’ve just been cruising with four premium MFDs for two weeks, often using them seriously for four or five hours a day.  But that doesn’t mean I’ve learned every nuance of these complex beasts, or that I’ve developed strong preferences.  Actually I have (mostly minor) complaints about every one of them!…even if they’re all way better than the electronics I used around this coast 40, 30, 20, 10, even 5 years ago.  I’m going to start with something fairly simple…

Jeffrey Siegel caused a minor ruckus when he titled an iphonesailing.net thread about ActiveCaptain “There’s no reason to buy another guide book…”  I’m a huge fan of AC, and I’ve watched Jeff’s bold predictions come true one after another, but in this case I’d like to think he was just trying to provoke a constructive argument.  I don’t think AC or any other source of cruising info will ever do a complete job, and my goal is have as many sources as possible on tap.  The little harbor I sit in right now is an excellent example…

My first reaction to a press release about the new Si-Tex SP36 autopilot — sure to be posted at the Si-Tex site soon — was that its nifty-looking color control head above looks exactly like one ComNav has offered for a while.   Not that rebranding the ComNav gear, which has a good reputation (I think), is a bad thing.  But what’s actually going on here is that Si-Tex has contracted ComNav to manufacture an autopilot to its own specifications, and at least one difference looks like a smart idea to me…

Last February Furuno made a lot of promises about improved charting in NavNet3D and MaxSea TimeZero, and it seems to be making good on all of them.  At least the North American MapMedia versions of “C-Map by Jeppesen” vector charts (explained here) are now available, as are the NN3D 2.05 and MSTZ 1.9 software upgrades that can display them.  Those upgrades purportedly do a lot more than make TimeZero the only charting software that can support both Navionics and C-Map cartography (given that Geonav’s “DualFuel” is only available in Europe until Fall, and the fate of Raymarine’s ambitious dual cartography plan is apparently uncertain.)  But before I get into those other improvements, I have some good examples of why you might want to have both Navionics and C-Map at your helm.  First, click on that image above showing Jeppesen C-Map coverage of the Exuma Islands in the Bahamas…

Garmin may have lost its bid for Raymarine last week, but, as noted, there’s plenty of evidence that it’s building a daunting marine electronics line on its own.  Check out the little  GPSMap
740s and the big GMR 604 xHD (pedestal) above for examples of growth in both directions.  It’s hard to imagine getting much more MFD into a casing less than 9 x 6 inches and under 2.5 pounds.  Meanwhile, all that cast aluminum in the radar base contributes to a heft of 46 pounds, not including the 12 pound array.  Which is actually 4′ 3.5″ wide, but still fit on Gizmo’s antenna mast…just.  Yup, both are now installed on the boat, along with a Garmin 5212 and a skeleton N2K sensor network.  My dash board projects are not quite ready to show off, but the testing season has begun…