The Marine Technology Hub
You may realize that Amazon’s “smart assistant” Alexa is like Apple’s Siri, except that you can ask “her” questions through an Echo speaker instead of an iPhone. But did you know that some marine app developers have created Alexa skills as free and possibly useful features? The underlying technology is awesome, but you don’t have to know much to make it work…
The small gauge wire connections usually required when installing NMEA 0183 data sharing often fail because normal boat wiring techniques don’t work well at this scale — or at least not in my clumsy DIY hands. So I was intrigued at first sight with this relatively new type of heat shrink butt connector that uses low-temperature solder instead of a crimping sleeve, and so far I’m quite impressed with the results.
My boating career started in the generally deep waters of the Great Lakes where the prevailing wisdom is: If you can’t see it, you can’t hit it. But cruising the Great Loop taught me the perils of shallow water boating, especially because our props hang lower than any other part of the hull by two feet. So I’ve gotten creative in an effort to make shallow water boating involve fewer clunks of running gear meeting bottom, and the most effective technique I’ve found so far is advanced scouting with our dinghy using the QuickDraw bottom survey feature of its Garmin Echomap 64cv.
Internet afloat isn’t always as simple as we would like it to be. Wave WiFi is working hard to make it simpler with their MBR-500 and MBR-550 multi-source routers. These routers have the ability to select between as many as six different sources of internet connectivity and can do it all automatically.
A hot room and air conditioning fans on high blowing warm air isn’t a good way to start your day. About two weeks ago I woke to just that. I knew something had to be wrong with the air conditioning but figuring out what involved a few wrong turns before finding what turned out to be a pretty obvious problem…
In 2015 I enjoyed testing, and then enthusing about, the first electronic distress signal that could effectively and legally replace the flares required on most of our boats by the US Coast Guard. Now there’s competition from the pyrotechnic flare company that originally denigrated the electronic “flare” and also an interesting expansion of the USCG standard in the works…
I was on Sombrero Beach yesterday when the loggerhead sea turtle known as Mr. T was released into the ocean after several months recuperating from a torn lung. It was easy to presume his joy — he powered flipped the last few feet of beach without hesitation — and the high emotion of the crowd was both undeniable and very special…
Blue Guard Innovations calls their BG-Link an internet of things (IoT) gateway and further describes it as a unique boat monitoring system. After my impressive test of their BG-One oil detecting bilge pump switch, I am intrigued to see what makes the BG-Link unique.
Today Fusion announced the MS-RA670, the third head unit in their Apollo line of marine stereos. I’ve been testing one for a few weeks and it looks like the 670 slots in between the top-of-the-line Apollo MS-RA770 and the much smaller MS-SRX400. Here’s the lowdown on what the 670 offers and how it fits within the line.
This was a nice surprise. It used to be tricky to connect a Navico MFD Ethernet network with a consumer-style boat router — and it remains impossible with some MFD models I’m pretty sure....
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