Category: Navigation

Twenty-three days on a Russian ice breaker following Roald Amundsen’s 1903 route through the Northwest Passage? Hell, yes, especially with David Burch — navigator extraordinare, and founder of Starpath — riding along as tutor and guide to the vessel’s bridge. If I had the money and the time (heck, it took Amundsen three years), I’d seriously consider this opportunity. For one thing, the venerable Kapitan Khlebnikov is going back into government service, and this may be her last Passage passage. And for another, the high latitudes — where compasses, celestial navigation, and even many forms of modern communications all get dicey — are what nav-obsessed gents like Burch live for…

Say hello to Simrad’s new NSS Sport series of multifunction displays — the NSS7, NSS8, and NSS12 — which are making their global debut today. They seem to have all the capabilities of the NSE series (which they can network with) plus a built-in GPS and, in the case of 7- and 8-inch sizes, a built-in Broadband fishfinder as well, along with quite competitive price tags (suggested retail prices of $1,895, $2,845 and $3,995 respectively). But the key feature is an LED backlit touch screen that is nearly as bright (1200 nits) as the NSE’s (1500), and which Simrad has used to create a combination knob, button, and touch interface it’s calling “Touch Sensible”…

Here’s a clever idea.  PYI worked with FLIR to create an accessory podlet for several of its Seaview MFD pods that serves as an integral casing for a relatively inexpensive (“just over $2,500”) thermal camera core.  The core’s output goes to the video input of whatever MFD is mounted on the working side of the pod so the user then has a simple forward-looking thermal view that can even be aimed using the pan and tilt abilities of the pod.  There’s a major limitation to this idea — the fact that thermal can’t see through glass or plastic — but I can think of situations where it might make a lot of sense…

This seems odd.  Yesterday the FAA issued a Flight Advisory — PDF here — warning that during a period of “GPS testing” starting today aircraft transiting the large area diagrammed above could find that “the GPS signal may be unreliable or unavailable.”  WTF?  But never mind sites like Engadget which immediately assumed that “anyone planning on using GPS in the southeastern US for the next month or so will likely want to make sure they have a fallback option.”  If you read the Advisory carefully you’ll see that whatever is being tested — which sure seems like jamming to me — will apparently be more effective at high altitudes than on the levels most of us travel…

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…