Panbo

The Marine Electronics Hub

Category: Wireless & Apps

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Wireless & Apps / NMEA 2000, 0183 & Signal K / Monitoring & Tracking

NMEA 2025: Vanemar Boat Monitoring

Boat monitoring isn’t a new category, but looking around the exhibition hall at the 2025 National Marine Electronics Association (NMEA) conference, you might think differently. The hall featured at least eight companies exhibiting boat monitoring products and nearly half the entrants in the Best New Product awards were boat monitors. So, why so much activity in boat monitoring? Frankly, I’m not entirely sure. However, there is a noticeable improvement in the quality of all the monitors I saw. I am excited by the refinement and advances in the products on display. Speaking of refinement, Turkey based Vanemar was there displaying their system with wireless sensors, NMEA 2000 integration, video capabilities and a slick app.

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Wireless & Apps / Network & control / Safety & SAR / NMEA 2000, 0183 & Signal K / Monitoring & Tracking

NMEA 2025: Digital Yacht Bilge IQ

Last week, the National Marine Electronics Association (NMEA) held their annual conference in West Palm Beach. This year’s conference featured quite a few interesting product introductions. I had the opportunity to see most of them while helping judge the NMEA’s Best New Product and NMEA Technology Awards. I plan several articles covering the various product introductions, though I’ll have to be quick about it as IBEX begins next week. Digital Yacht’s Bilge IQ is a NMEA 2000 and WiFi connected bilge pump control and monitoring system. The clever system monitors bilge pump activations, runtime, and current draw. My fellow judges and I thought enough of it to give it the Best New Product award. What did we see that intrigued us enough to award it? Let’s take a look.

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Mobile Apps / Wireless & Apps / Navigation / Handheld

Orca and Raymarine Axiom integration, easy route sharing from tablet to chart plotter

Tablet navigation has come an extremely long way in the decade and a half since Ben Ellison started covering it. However, for as far as the apps have come, integrations between navigation apps and chart plotters remain remarkably frustrating. Some in brand solutions, like Active Captain with Garmin equipment and TZ iBoat with Furuno plotters, work quite well. However, cross platform options typically involve clunky, multi-step export and import routines. Often, these routines require ejecting and inserting physical memory cards, a task made more complex as memory card slots move to the back of slick, all glass chart plotters. Raymarine and Orca have broken with recent trends and offer a wireless integration that allows for remarkably simple sharing of routes between a tablet running Orca and a Raymarine Axiom chartplotter.

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Getting Technical / Editors' Blog / Wireless & Apps / Network & control / Safety & SAR / The future

Getting Technical: Getting it together

When new classes of technology are introduced to the marine marketplace, they tend to focus on core functionality. Niceties like integrating with the rest of the boat’s control systems are not a priority. Hence, new technology and systems are frequently introduced with dedicated control systems. One result is that helms and control panels are littered with disparate controls, making real estate at the helm a hot commodity.

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Wireless & Apps / Network & control / The future / NMEA 2000, 0183 & Signal K / Monitoring & Tracking

DBMIBS 2025: Digital Yacht’s NjordLINK developer friendly boat monitoring solution

Digital Yacht’s streak of specialized and interesting NMEA 2000 products continues with NjordLINK. NjordLINK is a $139 gateway that connects to a boat WiFi network and shares data from the NMEA 2000 network with Digital Yacht’s Njord cloud. But, NjordLINK and the Njord cloud aren’t just a one way repository of data. Digital Yacht plans an entire ecosystem of cloud apps that can alert the boat owner and send data back to the boat.

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Wireless & Apps / Communications

Starlink 2025, here we go again

I’ve run out of ways to say that Starlink changes things a lot. My most frequent refrain about SpaceX’s low earth orbit satellite internet offering is the only constant is change. For a while, it looked like they were going to make a liar out of me. We haven’t seen much change recently. But fear not! Starlink is back with another round of major changes. This time those changes affect their mobile priority data and plans and most notably, eliminate unlimited high speed data from those offers.

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Wireless & Apps / Navigation / Safety & SAR

DBMIBS 2025: FLIR Ocean Scout Pro

I’m trying something a little different for my coverage of this year’s Miami show. I am going to try and produce a series of short videos with company representatives introducing their products. First up is FLIR’s Ocean Scout Pro thermal monocular. FLIR’s Jim McGowan gives us an overview of the new thermal scope.