The Marine Electronics Hub
The race to get hard drives into cell phones and PDAs may result in drives that really lend themselves to tough marine environments. Hitachi just announced a 1”, 8 gigabyte drive with ESP (“Extra Sensory Protection”). It uses...
Last week, when I enthused about plotters displaying DVDs, reader Don Parker unloaded on me about how easy this is to do with an onboard PC. He further expressed his general disgust with the “megalomaniacal”...
Over at rec.boats.electronics there’s a great thread underway about the ‘perfect’ built-in onboard computer. I’m particularly interested as I’ll likely go that route if and when I ever manage to finagle a larger cruising boat....
It was just last week that Rich Ray sent me this screenshot of MacENC, a new version of his GPSNavX charting program that supports NOAA’s free ENC vector charts. But after Tuesday’s news about...
Rosepoint Navigation’s Coastal Explorer is now in “open Beta”, meaning it’s essentially done and available for download by all registered 1.0 users. The retail version should be coming along soon. The “1.1” tag is dry...
Above is output from a free program developed in France called GPSActionRelay. It is written in Java, and will suppossedly run on any operating system. Features include replay of several boats in a regatta, polar...
A bonus of my trip to Annapolis was getting to try Maptech’s third generation i3. I first saw this system back in 2001, when it was being developed as the Sea Ray Navigator (and it’s...
Monitoring and control systems can potentially do anything. Once you have a system of sensors, cable backbones, PCs, screens, and so forth performing the core task of collecting and distributing information and system commands, well...
Big power outage here earlier this morning…coffee bean grinder no grind, DSL modem no blink…I’m definitely off my stride. I’m declaring this an OFI Friday, and will soon be off to fool with the fleet. If you’re...
I’m on the road to Annapolis where I’ll get to trial Maptech’s wild new fishfinder module for its i3 system, maybe catch a croaker too. The poor photo above is of a simulation playing at the...
