Category: Navigation

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)?

This week in Newport, and in Southhampton, Simrad introduced the NSO Navigation Series, a black box version of the NSE system, and while it’s hard to imagine an MFD faster than an NSE, even...

Here’s a nifty feature I’d never seen before.  I had already realized that if you click on a nav aid when making a route on a Garmin MFD, the waypoint gets named after the aid.  I find that useful, even if I first came across the feature years ago and think other current MFDs and charting programs include it (anyone remember which ones?).  But I was darn surprised yesterday morning to see that the Garmin 7212 can overlay the nav aid’s complete icon and label on its standard radar screen, if desired.  I like that a lot…