Panbo

The Marine Electronics Hub

Category: Safety & SAR

Garmin Quatix, best ‘aquatics’ watch yet? 45

Wireless & Apps / Safety & SAR

Garmin Quatix, best ‘aquatics’ watch yet?

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Holy Batman, the just-announced Garmin Quatix watch can connect wirelessly to a Garmin autopilot and not only show you what the AP is doing but let you steer the boat from your wrist. Plus if you fall overboard the lost wireless connection will set off an MOB alarm on a Garmin MFD and the AP will try to steer back to you. I hereby rescind my recent mumbling about Garmin’s conservative approach to marine electronics!  And aside from all the connectivity — the Quatix can apparently interface with Garmin PC, Mac, and iPad apps too — it seems like a heck of a boating watch even if you aren’t running other Garmin gear…

Goodbye dGPS? Hello Virtual AtoNs? 36

Navigation / Safety & SAR

Goodbye dGPS? Hello Virtual AtoNs?

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No one should get overly upset quite yet, but it does seem that the U.S. Coast Guard is thinking about reducing the differential GPS (DGPS) correction stations it manages, and is also wondering if all the aids to navigation (AtoNs) it maintains are truly necessary these days. My friend Dean Travis Clark recently joined the Navigation Safety Advisory Council (NAVSAC) and he just sent around two of its working group resolutions for comments. I know he’d like to hear the opinions of Panbo readers too, and that these resolutions have not yet been finalized or presented to the USCG…

Ocean Signal RescueME, best PLB yet? 17

Safety & SAR

Ocean Signal RescueME, best PLB yet?

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The Ocean Signal RescueMe PLB introduced this morning at METS is not just a little smaller than the competition; it’s purportedly 30% smaller in volume and that claim seems borne out by the photo. Size is important because the smaller a distress beacon is the more likely it is that the owner will have it with him or her when it’s actually needed. Of course when things go wrong a PLB has got to work well too, even if it’s years old, and the RescueMe also looks good in those terms…

FLIBS 2012 redo #1, Raymarine Lighthouse v5 15

Navigation / Safety & SAR / The Trade

FLIBS 2012 redo #1, Raymarine Lighthouse v5

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It’s telling of the Great Convergence when the biggest electronics news of a boat show is arguably a software upgrade. I don’t mean that innovation in marine electronics has slowed down, not at all. But whereas the Big Four have now all rationalized and modernized their product lines — though in some cases it took painful operating system rebuilds — big features can often be realized just by unleashing capabilities already build into MFDs or available from sensors that can already be interfaced. We just saw two neat new Fusion 700 audio interface update, but now consider all the features crammed into Raymarine’s Lighthouse v5 update, which was just announced the first day of FLIBS and — holy cow — is already available for all a-, c-, and e-Series MFDs…

AIS MoB & SART display, Garmin nails it? 19

Safety & SAR / AIS

AIS MoB & SART display, Garmin nails it?

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I think that personal AIS beacons are a deservedly hot new safety technology but, as discussed in June, the display manufacturers are just learning how to handle them well. In fact, right around that same time I had to add bug alert comments to an earlier Kannad R10 AIS MoB beacon entry about how a certain Garmin software update could cause its MFDs to shut down after receiving the beacon’s test signal!  It was an embarrassing moment in product improvement, as documented in these email warnings to the Newport-Bermuda race fleet, but Garmin eventually solved the issue and may indeed have set a new bar for the proper integration of AIS beacons. The screen above, for instance, shows how very clearly the Garmin 7212 on Gizmo alarms shortly after I activated the test mode on a Kannad R10…

Nordwind 1939, gearing up for the Northwest Passage! 16

What's on board... / Safety & SAR

Nordwind 1939, gearing up for the Northwest Passage!

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A Camden Harbor 2012 spring bonus has been getting to know that classy 85-foot wooden yawl as she prepared for an attempt at the Northwest Passage. Her name is Nordwind though her mainsail cover and life rings are marked Nordwind 1939, presumably in memory of both her launch year and the Fastnet Race in which she set a record that held for twenty-four years. Some of this history can be found on Nordwind’s 2011 Transatlantic Race page along with mention of her recent rounding of Cape Horn. This old boat still gets around!  I suspect that her greatest asset for the adventure north is the fact that her professional skipper, Alex Veccia, has already sailed her so many hard miles. But if you look closely in her rigging, you’ll see that he will have some new electronic helpers…

AIS MOB devices, we’re in the learning phase! 33

Safety & SAR / AIS

AIS MOB devices, we’re in the learning phase!

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One of the great things about the new AIS MoB beacons, like the recently FCC approved Kannad SafeLink R10, is that they can send a short test signal over the air so that you can see how well your AIS plotter has been programmed to deal with one. But the fact that I’ve been encouraging folks to do just that makes it even more imperative that I report on a bug in very recent Garmin MFD software versions 7.30, 4.30, and 3.80. (See comment on the R10 entry above for more detail, but you probably don’t have the bug unless you updated your Garmin in last three weeks). While Garmin purportedly did a great job of programming its displays to respond usefully to an AIS MoB, apparently the test signal from an R10 can cause its MFDs to shut down, which was just discovered in Newport where the Bermuda Race fleet is gathering…

DeLorme inReach 1.5, groovy with an iPad 34

Wireless & Apps / Safety & SAR

DeLorme inReach 1.5, groovy with an iPad

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DeLorme just started shipping a new 1.5 version of the inReach satellite messenger, tracker, and distress device that works with an Apple iOS version of the Earthmate app as well as an improved Android version. I again participated in the Beta testing and, though almost all of that was ashore, I’m even more convinced that inReach is going to become a constant cruising companion on Gizmo and many other boats. It’s hard to say whether some improvements are due to the new hardware or the new apps versions or the platforms I’m using them on, but for boat use the combination of inReach 1.5 and even an iPad 1 is totally sweeeeet…

SPOT Connect, works fine & deserves attention 30

Wireless & Apps / Safety & SAR

SPOT Connect, works fine & deserves attention

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If it’s heartbreaking to see a cheerful-looking Aegean crew underway in fine weather less than 24 hours before they perished — as we discussed earlier this week — isn’t it even worse to know that they sent a fart joke to friends and family by satellite messenger just a few hours before everything went wrong on North Coronado Island?  Getting access (via Sailing Anarchy) to Aegean’s Spot Share Page is also how I surmised that they were using a Spot Connect rather than the familiar stand-alone orange model, which is why they could send short custom messages typed on an iPhone, iPad, or Android device. There’s more I learned…

Kannad R10 AIS MoB beacon gets FCC approval, but not easily! 24

Safety & SAR / AIS

Kannad R10 AIS MoB beacon gets FCC approval, but not easily!

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Kannad Marine’s SafeLink R10 SRS (for Survivor Rescue System) just received FCC approval, and it’s about time given that this personal AIS SART was introduced in Miami more than a year ago!  But let’s give Kannad a break as getting innovative safety hardware like this through the approval process is not trivial. Just looking through all the documents filed with the FCC was an eye opener, and the company had already spent many months (and dollars) getting EU approval.  Before discussing those details, though, let’s look at how easy-to-use yet powerful the finished product is. The collage above illustrates the activation process (click on it for a bigger image) and I personally love how a bit of cord is rigged both to keep the R10 attached to your life jacket or clothing and to pull off the orange Arming Tag and the red Activation Cap in one motion. It’s also key to the automatic activation possible when the four ounce R10 is “professionally fitted” to certain inflatable life jackets (as detailed on Kannad’s R10 web page…