Category: Safety & SAR

I first got excited about RTEs (Radar Target Enhancers) in 2002 when the Sea-Me came out; in fact, it inspired one of my favorite PMY columns (in which you’ll also learn why I want a whomping big horn on Gizmo).  The Sea-Me went on to be quite a successful product, at least in the U.K., but now Echomax — the Brits who already build a respected line of static radar reflectors — has come out with its own Active-X RTE, and apparently it just plain kicks Sea-Me’s butt…

If the remarkably small and inexpensive GPS-equipped Fast Find PLB also works very well, what does that mean?  My guess is that it makes McMurdo king of the PLB hill, at least for a...

When I wrote about SafeLife in January, I didn’t realize that this full-on through-satellite EPIRB and PLB testing service wasn’t quite ready to go.  In fact, it’s not trivial to put together the system...

No, the new FLIR M-Series and its controller are not the same size, but here’s my attempted graphic point: That sexy dual-payload pan and tilt camera casing — at only eleven inches tall — is smaller than your eye might presume. While that’s still taller than the competitors’ search light casings, the M-Series can pan +/-90 degrees, has a horizontal swept volume equal only to its seven inch maximum diameter, and it…

Marine WatchMate is a boat security system that can include up to four cameras which can be monitored on board, on a computer ashore (via the Internet), or even on certain cell phones…

A major press event in Miami was FLIR’s on water demo of its neat new mid-priced M-Series dual camera system, which I’ll cover next week.  But first I’ll discuss the recent efforts of two FLIR competitors to make enhanced vision more “affordable”.  Above is VEI’s OceanView Apollo II, which features…

Smaller, better, cheaper! McMurdo’s new Fast Find 210 PLB is just a bit over four inches long (my model has small hands), but features not only a 50 channel GPS but also an SOS flashing LED. And it will probably retail for under $300. I say probably because…

Last May I wrote about the benefits of live end-to-end EPIRB/PLB testing and a company—BeaconSure—that I thought could do it for us. I also e-mailed BeaconSure at that time and never heard back…

One reason that this holiday season seems a little gray was finding out that some bastards decided to make a few dollars by counterfeiting the Hammar H20 hydrostatic releases used on many ships to automatically deploy life rafts and EPIRBs in a desperate situation…