Category: The Trade

Marine Technology Advisors is really taking shape. You’ll find a new web site at that link, and better yet, the firm tells me that it’s getting some attention from marine electronics manufacturers and distributors. The following entry, like the ones in April, is based on last year’s survey, specifically where “integration” fit in when marine electronics buyers were asked to rank its importance versus other criteria like pricing, reliability, performance, and feature sets. Nearly 1,000 of you took the survey last year — which established some good base numbers — and starting tomorrow the 2011 survey will begin. Please come around whether you filled in the original or want to add your two cents.

Last week Marine Technology Advisors (MTA) began publishing more results of the 2010 survey. This is the second installment:  Among a long list of market characteristics MTA tested for – and will be testing...

In February, 2010, I wrote about how the little marine electronics industry could use some market intelligence — often called MI — and welcomed a startup firm called Marine Technology Advisors. MTA created a...

It was just coincidence that all the leather seating on this rather amazing Albatro 50 RIB was darn close to Simrad’s shade of red, but you had to wonder as Navico seemed to think of everything  when it came to the launch of the Simrad NSS touch-screen MFD series in Palma, Spain. First there were detailed presentations on the state of Navico, where Simrad and NSS fit into the brand and product matrix, and just how the NSS was developed (which included lots of before and during usability testing). Then each of the nearly fifty magazine writers got four demo sessions aboard an appropriate selection of the ten highly varied yachts Simrad had rigged with NSS and selections of what has become a large family of NS display and system options. And throughout the two days we had all sorts of Navico/Simrad staff to ask questions of, and they all seemed to know the products well…

I’m a little hazy about my Miami International Boat Show history — twelve in a row, I think — but I’m pretty sure this has been the best yet.  One highlight was planing a...

I’ve been waiting on some screen shots before writing about the “Geonav writers event” I attended in early December but, frankly, the gear demonstration was rather preliminary anyway, as the two most technically advanced products — the GIS multifunction and MIS instrument displays highlighted here in September — were not shown.   While I’ll soon have more about what I did see in action, I’ve realized that what I did learn a lot about in Florida was the family of companies Geonav has joined.  While it was clear that the brand would undergo serious changes when it was bought by Johnson Outdoors in late 2007, I didn’t really understand what that Johnson name meant until I received the presentation from which I clipped the slide above…

Nice!  As of New Year’s Day all new Raymarine products are eligible for a free extra year of warranty as long as the owner registers them online (always a good idea anyway).  And that’s not all:  Raymarine has also instituted “Rapid Care” which means that if your product (excepting radar and sat TV antennas) is in its first year of warranty and needs repair, Ray will ship you a “like-new remanufactured” unit within two business days of receiving the broken one.  This strikes me as a smart way for FLIR — which might be called Raymarine’s thermally-obsessed sugar daddy) — to express its longterm commitment to the company and its customers, but does it also mean that Raymarine now has the best warranty program in the business?…

While the currently advertised marine services sound modest, the Geek Squad has major ambitions regarding the marine electronics installation business.  To be more specific, they hope to eventually have installers based at some 450-500...