The Marine Electronics Hub
It’s no surprise that I get a lot of questions about the best way to receive and watch TV onboard. The traditional choices for homes were already more complicated on a boat, especially a cruising boat, and now there’s the added choice of streaming TV over the internet. So in this entry, I’ll detail the options and hopefully you can determine which one best fits your needs and budget.
There are a lot of WiFi bridges that can connect your boat to the Internet, though as I mentioned in my article on marine internet, depending on WiFi for connectivity while travelling can be hit and miss. But, without a WiFi bridge the chances of a usable connection decline dramatically…
On Tuesday I met with some of the ActiveCaptain Community team, and the key news is that Garmin recently contacted marine businesses to explain the three-tier business “ownership” and advertising plan they intend to roll out in late August. I think it’s brilliant (and so is the world’s largest revolving globe).
My interest in electric assist bicycles has not waned a bit since I wrote about my boat ebike research early last year. In fact, I now own five, including the two Sondors folding models above. I’ve also learned a lot more about what to look for. I will share the possible downsides but be forewarned that I’ve become an ebike evangelist…
The screen above may look like an app running exclusively on the boat, but actually all that data was being easily uploaded to my private data cloud thanks to Gizmo’s FloatHub monitoring system, plus the AIS target info was being automatically shared with the public via Marine Traffic. There are many benefits to sharing the AIS data your boat receives, and FloatHub has other recent improvements with more coming…
On May 23rd Garmin shut down the old way of distributing ActiveCaptain (AC) data and turned on the new ActiveCaptain Community (ACC) servers. All the mobile apps, charting programs and MFDs programmed to work with AC stopped updating unless they had been newly modified. In the table below you’ll see that the number of products currently able to display and edit ACC POIs is pretty small. Hopefully, more blue checks will soon be added, and that’s why this entry is definitely “subject to change.”
I am a long time fan of ActiveCaptain boating info. In fact, I’m pretty sure that my January 2007 Camden Public Landing review above was one the very first, as I was simultaneously writing about AC’s inception here. Now the AC database and user community are both huge, but many of us “captains” are struggling with Garmin’s very recent and complete rebuild of the service…
When I first read Uniden’s MHS335B handheld VHF press release, the feature that really intrigued me was “Maritime Industry-First Private Text Messaging.” The release was a little short on details and I was left with more questions than answers. But I was glad when Uniden kindly loaned me two radios to see all their VHF, GPS, DSC, and texting features hand’s on…
Even bolder than the advertising tagline quoted in my title is sentence two of the Apollo press release: “Building on FUSION’s industry recognized True-Marine design philosophy, the new Apollo Series will forever change the face of marine entertainment and set a new standard by which all others will be created.” And the Apollo name and logo even reference the classical Greek god of music. It would all seem immensely pretentious if Fusion hadn’t also gone big with design and audio goodness. But, by golly, I think Apollo delivers…
In my feature about marine internet, I referenced a Ubiquiti EdgeRouter as the “heart of our boat network.” It manages multiple WiFi and cellular internet connections to multiple computers, tablets, etc. around the boat, and is remarkably capable for its cost, but configuration is not for the faint of the heart. So this is the step-by-step guide…
