Panbo

The Marine Technology Hub

Category: The Trade

Lowrance Elite-4 HDI, a whole lot of tech for a little dough 9

Fishing & Sonar / Navigation / The Trade

Lowrance Elite-4 HDI, a whole lot of tech for a little dough

Lowrance_Elite-4_HDI.jpgWhile I don’t normally follow the small-size displays closely, the new Lowrance Elite-4 HDI models announced yesterday seems to sport a remarkable ratio of dedicated marine electronics to cost. Their bright 4.3-inch LED-backlit screens, for instance, are substantially bigger than the Elite-4 models they replace, which were praised for their value. The plain Elite-4 HDI model, with a suggested $299 retail price, not only offers both regular fishfinding and high-frequency narrow beam downscanning — each with a shallow/deep frequency choice built into the included transom transducer — but also includes GPS, a bundle of lake and coastal cartography, and support for all sorts of chart card types…

METS 2013: Glomex WeBBoat, fingers on Garmin and Simrad, and more 5

Navigation / Entertainment / The future / The Trade

METS 2013: Glomex WeBBoat, fingers on Garmin and Simrad, and more

mets_2013_glomex_webboat.jpg

The Marine Equipment Trade Show 2013 held in Amsterdam last week lived up to its reputation again. The trade floors were packed with exhibitors, and I was told that the booths were packed with visitors on the first two show days. Fortunately, it wasn’t as busy during my third day visit and I could move around easily — if not as anonymously as before; at Garmin I was welcomed as “Hey, you’re the guy from Panbo!”  Ben has already reported on Garmin’s down- and side scanning sonar, xHD radomes, etc., plus the new Simrad NSS and B&G Zeus2 Series, but I got to see the new products in action and there was much more to cover, like that neat Glomex WebBoat WiFi/3G access point seen above…

Simrad NSS evo2, multi-touch 7-inch to 16-inch and beyond 48

Wireless & Apps / Navigation / The Trade

Simrad NSS evo2, multi-touch 7-inch to 16-inch and beyond

Simrad_NSS9_evo2_new_11-13.jpgAt METS this morning,  Simrad announced an evo2 update to the NSS Series and quite an update it is. The new multi-touch wide screen models will come in 7-, 9-, 12- and 16-inch sizes and since they are close family in every way to the recently discussed NSO evo2, a boater will be able to mix and match bright, glass-bridge-style displays from 7 to 24-inches. And while NSS evo2 can network with Simrad’s radars, sonars, SonicHub audio, WiFi 1 etc., all four sizes come with “embedded CHIRP enabled Broadband sounder and StructureScan” (which can probably network out to the whole family)…

GOST, FLIR, and KVH: working together 1

Communications / The Trade

GOST, FLIR, and KVH: working together

GOST_FLIR_KVH_joint_advertisement.jpgIt’s quite unusual to illustrate a Panbo entry with an advertisement, but I think this one has editorial content. Isn’t it great to see three separate companies state in print that their electronics will work together to accomplish a complex task? Won’t that make it harder for any one of the three customer service departments to point the blame for operational problems elsewhere? Plus the task in this case — to put the control and output of yacht cameras onto the Internet so owners or crew can access it anywhere — is pretty impressive. 

NOAA erases the Magenta Line, will crowdsourcing step up? 8

Charts / The Trade

NOAA erases the Magenta Line, will crowdsourcing step up?

NOAA_Inside_Route__3_1913_cPanbo.jpgWhen Peter Swanson called to say he’d just become PassageMaker’s new editor-in-chief (which he’ll be great at, I think), the conversation soon turned to our strong mutual interests in cruising, electronics and charts. That’s how I finally learned that NOAA has started to remove the magenta chart lines that guide many users of the Intracoastal Waterway (ICW) and that they may never be replaced. Peter wrote about the issue in August, and NOAA recently put up a notably well-crafted Federal Register article that seeks more comments from the public. That’s where I learned that the brightly colored “recommended route lines” began on a 1913 chart series called the Inside Route Pilot — fascinating sample above, full size here — and that they haven’t been comprehensively updated since the 1930’s, when taxpayers spent a lot of money expanding the ICW (and creating jobs)…

NMEA & IBEX 2013 awards, winners & explanations 9

The Trade

NMEA & IBEX 2013 awards, winners & explanations

NMEA_2013_Technology_Award_cPanbo.jpgThat’s Raymarine’s Larry Rencken accepting the NMEA New Technology Award for the Evolution autopilot system from NMEA Director Bruce Angus (with NMEA Office Manager Cindy Love assisting). This was Evolution’s second honor in two weeks — congratulations! — as it also shared the IBEX Innovation Award for electronics, as discussed on Panbo here. Whereas I was involved in that first contest and a close observer of the various NMEA Awards, I thought I’d explain how they work and also note the other winners. No awards process I know of is perfectly fair, but these are handled quite seriously and are worthy of attention, I think.

IBEX13 #2: Simrad NSO evo2, a new multi-touch glass helm architecture 11

Navigation / The Trade

IBEX13 #2: Simrad NSO evo2, a new multi-touch glass helm architecture

Simrad_NSO_evo2_dual_video_slide.jpgWhile Simrad may the last of the Big Four to introduce a high-performance multi-touch glass bridge system, it seems like they’ve added at least one significant twist to the concept. The new NSO evo2 black box contains two independent main processors which can drive two independent displays. The brochure claims that this architecture gives you “the freedom to view and control your onboard systems more easily while making every dual station installation or larger networked system simple and much more cost effective.”  It’s a claim that I tentatively buy…

VIRB cameras, the Garmin ‘ecosystem’ expands 7

Wireless & Apps / Cabin & deck gear / The Trade

VIRB cameras, the Garmin ‘ecosystem’ expands

Garmin_VIRB_elite_Panbo.jpgYesterday Garmin big-footed into a new niche with new VIRB action cameras — VIRB as in verb, as in action (I think). It’s not a boat camera per se, but I expect that one will be useful and fun around a boat, and it’s also another indication of the company’s product ‘ecosystem’ stradegy. Garmin was just getting into dedicated marine electronics when I began covering the subject in depth over a decade ago, but nonetheless the major players almost unanimously cited the big Kansas complex full of engineers (with its own factory in Taiwan) as their biggest competitive fear. I suspect it was capablities like this that caused the concern. VIRB is not an assault on any marine companies but CNet’s sharp analysis is aptly titled “Garmin gets up in GoPro’s grill with VIRB HD cameras“…

Volvo Penta (Garmin) Glass Cockpit, just the beginning? 16

Navigation / Electrical & Engines / The Trade / NMEA 2000, 0183 & Signal K

Volvo Penta (Garmin) Glass Cockpit, just the beginning?

Volvo_Penta_Garmin_Glass_Bridge.jpgWhen I wrote about seeing the new Garmin 8000 Glass Helm series in Miami, several knowledgeable readers commented about how it would be used as part of a complete Volvo Penta engine/helm package. They were right. Garmin announced the VP Glass Cockpit yesterday and it’s already up in detail at Volvo Penta. The main features seem to be great nav screen integration with joystick, trim, and autopilot controls plus a single vendor for all, but is this also what we’re going to see from all the glass bridge/helm/cockpit systems?

Intellian Technologies: smart, articulate & classy 10

Communications / Entertainment / The Trade

Intellian Technologies: smart, articulate & classy

Intellian_tour_2013_courtesy_Intellian.jpg

Intellian Technologies has come a long way since they first introduced their own brand of satellite TV antenna systems at the 2008 NMEA Conference, where I first met them. In fact, the company may well be the fastest growing in marine electronics, going from 77 employees in 2010 to 160 today. Intellian has also gone from supplying only the relatively modest end of the marine TV antenna market to all size vessels, broadband satellite communications definitely included. The company story is interesting on many levels, but there was a particularly telling moment as Global Marketing VP Paul Comyns (standing above) and CEO Eric Sung (to his left) addressed the group of American and European boating journalists that Intellian hosted in Korea.