Panbo News and Reviews

January 12, 2011

Digital Yacht BOATraNET, something truly different?

Interesting! Digital Yacht’s BOATraNET — just being introduced at the London Boat Show — is a low-amperage 12v Linux server designed expressly to deliver all sorts of NMEA 0183 and/or 2000 boat data, plus centrally stored info and media, via WiFi to whatever assemblage of smart phones, tablets, and PCs are on board your boat. And you won’t need a special app but rather just a new generation browser running HTML 5. You can also connect a high power WiFi transceiver to BOATraNET so that all your devices can get online via the boat’s own hot spot when you’re in port. Can anyone argue with Digital Yacht’s characterization of this concept as “revolutionary”?…

Communications

January 10, 2011

Garmin’s wireless VHF mic, Simrad’s too

Anyone with a Garmin 200 or 300 series VHF will likely be pleased to learn that they can now add up to three wireless mics with full controls. Garmin announced the GHS 20 handsets along with the GWH 20 wireless hub needed to run them last week, and the product page suggests they’re nearly ready to ship. It’s all sort of sneaky — though in a good way — as the wireless mic possibility is not even mentioned in the VHF 200 or 300 literature and manuals. However, these handsets are not inexpensive…

And hello Cerberus! Spot Connect on steroids?

Wireless & Apps / Communications

January 9, 2011

And hello Cerberus! Spot Connect on steroids?

Yes indeed, if you’re already wowed about how Globalstar’s new SPOT Connect might help you communicate when you wander beyond cellular, you’ll likely mumble multiple wows once you understand the abilities of the somewhat similar Iridium-powered...

Wireless & Apps / Safety & SAR

January 6, 2011

SPOT Connect(s), the mobile apps way

Yes indeed, that is an Android app serving as the extended front end of yet another iteration of the good old SPOT satellite messenger. It’s called SPOT Connect, and it’s a close relative of the Delorme joint product announced at this time last year. The SPOT hardware is again an independent, waterproof communicator that can send out a distress message by itself, but now its third internal wireless component — after GPS and Globalstar short burst messenging — is Bluetooth. Which means that a SPOT app on most any sort of mobile device can be used to send canned “Help” or “Check-in” emails/texts, or to turn on tracking, or — and this was the big new feature on the Delorme PN60W — write a custom 41 character message. Another Connect difference is that the actual shipping date will apparently come much sooner after the announcement…

Warranties, Raymarine (FLIR) goes to three years

The Trade

January 5, 2011

Warranties, Raymarine (FLIR) goes to three years

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?…

Navigation

January 4, 2011

Garmin GMR 604 xHD, hand’s on

So that’s the Garmin GMR 604 xHD open array radar I installed last May painting a crowded harbor on the screen of a GPSMap 7212 in late July. Gizmo was headed southwest at the time — the GPS heading, or COG, is meaningless because she’s tied up to a float — and so you have to twist your brain a bit to see how well the radar is imaging the details of Jonesport’s Sawyer Cove, and hence that the long straight target at the upper left is the famously uncharted steel and concrete breakwater there. And I think if you make the comparison you’ll agree that the true color target display really helps to understand what the radar is doing. Those light blue and green returns at upper left, for instance, are almost certainly some sort of noise created the breakwater’s heft and hardness. I could have turned the gain down to eliminate that noise, but then I might not have seen the light blue at lower left — which is an emerging mud flat, I think — and similarly difficult targets once I got underway. True color returns is indeed my favorite feature of the xHD/7212 combination…

Navigation / The future

December 31, 2010

Gizmo 2010-2011, Happy New Year!

I was happy to do some late season cruising and electronics testing on Gizmo this year, and am also happy that she’s snuggled high and dry under shrink wrap now that winter — including at least a foot of the white stuff — is really here. But something I’m really excited about in 2011 is my plan to take the boat south next Fall. Oh, I don’t intend to stop working; in fact, if the manufacturers continue to cooperate with what may be the industry’s longest testing program, Gizmo’s flying bridge will look fairly similar to what I put together this season. (Which, come to think of it, I haven’t shown off until now; click above for a bigger image, and be assured that I have hundreds of screen shots yet to sort through and write about.) A long gunkholing, blogging, and boat-show-ing circuit to, say, Charleston and back is sure motivating me, though…

Class B AIS filtering, the word from Dr. Norris

AIS

December 28, 2010

Class B AIS filtering, the word from Dr. Norris

Why not ask the man who wrote the book? Dr. Andy Norris writes authoritatively about ship level electronics for the Nautical Institute and Digital Ship; has chaired IEC Technical
Committee 80 on maritime navigation since 1992; once worked as Technical Director for Kelvin Hughes and helped start ChartCo; and is himself a sailor who’s earned an RYA Yachtmaster Ocean certificate. Plus he’s helped Panbo readers (and writers 😉 better understand the limitations of AIS before. So when I recently attempted to deconstruct the notion that watchkeepers use filtering tools built into the new ship radars with integrated AIS tracking to completely ignore Class B AIS targets, and then found indications that it is sort of possible, I asked Dr. Norris — whose IEC committee wrote the spec — to please “clarify just what’s permitted in terms of AIS target filtering.” The issue, he warned me, “is more complex than it looks”…

AIS

December 27, 2010

ShipFinder iPhone/iPad giveaway, Happy Holidays

One of several things I like about the latest (2.29) version of the Ship Finder HD AIS viewer for the iPad is that when you zoom out you’ll see available targets grouped by the shore receivers that Ship Finder’s developer (“pinkfroot” is its unusual name) currently has access to. Some users seem to have a hard time getting the concept, but as I’ve written before, “the most important thing about a remote AIS viewer — be it on the Web,
or an iPhone, or wherever — has to be the data feeds it uses.” Pinkfroot now also has a free Web viewer that shows the same data feeds. The truth is that coverage around much of North America is pretty darn spotty and will stay that way until more of us set up receivers and give the data feeds to Pinkfroot and all the other developers who rebroadcast it for public enjoyment…

Vesper Marine anchor watch, Merry Christmas!

AIS

December 23, 2010

Vesper Marine anchor watch, Merry Christmas!

The Vesper Marine WatchMate 850 Class B AIS transponder, which just received FCC approval this week, is already a very interesting product, as discussed here in September. But an extra feature that hadn’t been developed back then, and still isn’t mentioned on the Vesper site, is the ability to use the unit as an anchor watch. And it can be an especially effective anchor watch thanks to the intrinsic nature of AIS and the WatchMate’s particular characteristics…