Autotether, tests great!
The Autotether wireless engine kill switch system sounded good to me on first Web site read, but, by golly, it’s even better in the flesh. I’ve been testing it for a while now, and can tell you…
Category: Safety & SAR
FOB to Finland, Class B & Spot onboard!
Sometimes you-know-who works in mysterious ways. On Saturday afternoon I watched a long-time friend, Tom Amory, set sail for Finland with his daughter and her friend, but without the Simrad AI50 Class B AIS transponder he’d tried so hard to obtain…
EPIRB testing, definitely possible
While evidence of unusual EPIRB failure activity remains scarce, who doesn’t like the idea of testing their own, as often and as thoroughly as possible? So I always try…
EPIRB failures II, the flame war
Well, if I’m going to post on Memorial Day, I guess a war sub-text is appropriate. You see, Rob Stormer got very upset about what I thought was a polite, if argumentative, commentary on his EPIRB failure “investigation”. His displeasure is pretty vivid in the rebuttal he posted today, but you should have heard…
EPIRB failures, where’s the meat?
Is there a problem with EPIRBs? Robin Storm thinks so, and is even calling for a congressional investigation into what he perceives as an alarming number of failures and a flawed failure investigation system. But I read his whole report and, at the risk of sounding cranky, must ask: “Where’s the meat?”…
SeaKey v2, a field report
Preston Calvert is one of several valuable contributors to the HD radar discussion, which is how I got e-mailing with him last night. Which is how I confirmed that he is indeed the same Preston whose Riviera 45 was tested in PMY recently, except his Neuromancer3 is better looking, and a lot more geeked out, than the boat they used in the main photo shoot. It also turns out that Preston is a new user of SeaKey v2, and he
SPOT share pages, in beta
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…
TracMe revisited, today’s the day
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):
Capt. Joe crew rescued, AIS helped
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…
MatysOnBoard, all-in-one offshore comms
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…
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