The Marine Electronics Hub
Touchscreens work well for many tasks at a boat helm (and elsewhere), I think, but a touchscreen throttle never even occurred to me until I read about the Navy “reverting to physical throttles” on warships like the USS John S McCain. Holy cow! Why the heck did we deprive destroyer drivers of the excellent (electronic) control interface known as a throttle lever, and why is Wired magazine mispresenting the “reversion”?
If you’ve been reading Panbo, boating magazines, or spent any time at a boat show you’ve likely seen boat monitors, connected boat products and smart boat products. But, you may well not know what these things are or how they’re different from each other. Hopefully, I can help shed some clarity on this latest collection of buzzwords.
A couple of weeks ago Visible announced they have removed the 5 megabits per second speed cap making their $40 unlimited plan even more interesting. In my entry on the change I promised I would order a line and see how it worked out. The SIM has arrived and testing is well underway and although it hasn’t been all sunshine and roses I’m going to try using Visible as my main cell carrier
Lowrance, a world-leader in fishing electronics since 1957, announced the next step in Lowrance’s delivery of the ultimate fishing system to the serious angler – the new Lowrance Ghost freshwater trolling motor.
Visible, a relatively new Verizon subsidiary, has been offering a $40 per month (taxes included) unlimited plan for about a year. While the plan’s pricing is great, its usefulness has been potentially limited by a 5mbps speed cap. Today Visible announced that they’re removing this speed cap while keeping the rest of the plan the same. Is this as good as it sounds?
Prior to being a boating geek… I was a professional geek. I have a lot of data on the NMEA 2000 network on Have Another Day but no way to access it all remotely. I’m getting ready to leave the boat for a few weeks so I really want to access all that data off the boat. After some digging for a way to make that off boat access possible, I found one with which I’m currently thrilled.
Have Another Day is currently in Fort Myers on the Caloosahatchee River where the daily highs are in the low to mid-90s, and even the marina water is nearly 90 degrees. Last month the boat sucked down over $300 in electricity, more than she uses in an entire season in Chicago, and I figured my biggest culprit is likely the 48,000 BTU split gas Salon AC unit…
Internet afloat isn’t always as simple as we would like it to be. Wave WiFi is working hard to make it simpler with their MBR-500 and MBR-550 multi-source routers. These routers have the ability to select between as many as six different sources of internet connectivity and can do it all automatically.
Actisense have released the W2K-1, their highly anticipated NMEA 2000 Wi-Fi Gateway with data logging technology that has the ability to record navigational and engine data – a feature that is completely unique in the market place.
This was a nice surprise. It used to be tricky to connect a Navico MFD Ethernet network with a consumer-style boat router — and it remains impossible with some MFD models I’m pretty sure....
