The Marine Electronics Hub
The SPOT satellite messenger is about to get more attractive to many boaters. Originally it wasn’t all that easy to share your tracking with friends and family; in fact, to do so you had to share your entire Spot account user name and password. But now Spot is beta testing a pretty sophisticated feature that enables Web sharing of both tracks and messages…
The good Doug Ritter (above) knows how to have a little boyish fun on April One, including some well deserved shots at the ineffectual FCC and the not-at-all funny TracMe “PLB” folks (who have at least taken “boating” off their applications list):
Last Wednesday night, the 97′ clam dredge Captain Joe sank suddenly 30 miles off Point Pleasant, New Jersey in 10′ seas. Air and sea temperatures were in the low 40’s and the wind NW near 30 knots (according to a nearby C-Man buoy). You can hear some, maybe all, of the bone-chilling…
Here’s a reversal: I tested this Matys OnBoard Iridium/GSM distress/SMS/voice/email communicator months ago, and my PMY write-up is already online. There you can see the reassuring way…
My PMY March column about the SPOT satellite messenger is now online, and you’ll see that I gave the company guff for what I thought was “hyped-up fear marketing.” But in fact they’ve toned that down quite a bit recently.
Who’s going to argue with that? I first noted MariTech’s use of the female form to sell the Virtual Lifeline wireless engine shut-off back in ‘05. These days they’ve switched body parts, but the system seems pretty similar, a good sign of effectiveness really. But it looks like they’ve got a serious new competitor in Autotether, which…
Friday’s entry may not have been clear; I only meant to snipe at the New York Times (lightly), and not at Spot. In fact, Spot was one of my four picks for the electronics section of Sail’s annual Freeman K. Pittman Innovation Awards, mentioned earlier with other M.E. awards and now out in the February issue (though sadly not on line)…
Alas, my fantasy life is not Clark Beek exhilarating. In fact you might deem it rather pathetic, like yesterday’s imaginary turn at the New York Times copy desk red-lining the bejezum out of a blurb about SPOT…
I may be annoyed at the FCC, but the U.S. Coast Guard never ceases to impress me. In this CG video, also viewable below, a chopper team…
Though my first SPOT test entry garnered no comments, I remain convinced that some boaters will go for this gadget/service once they fully understand what it can do for them…
