Panbo: surveys, comments, & Paris
I’m headed to Boston and then a flight to Paris where my wife and I hope to enjoy the sights and also see our son Curran, crack drummer for Today is the Day, help...
Panbo News and Reviews
Nigel Calder update, charts & HyMar
Nigel Calder and I talked non-stop for about six hours on Friday (and probably could have kept going if we were younger men). He visited because he’s working on a new edition of How to Read a Nautical Chart
BoatUS towing app, & the iPad Grip
Gizmo is still ashore, but she shed her shrink-wrap this week and today I had a few enjoyable hours aboard tidying up and fooling with some new accessories. One is the handy mount holding the iPad up next to the Datalux police car computer (which apparently survived the winter aboard fine), but first let’s talk about the free and very clever BoatUS smartphone app showing on the pad. Some of the features alluded to in that link aren’t enabled yet, but its primary function — making an automated call for a tow — worked very well in my test…
The XTE issue, autopilot behavior & electronics dollars
All those bodies boating in the rain represent a lot of money spent over a problem never fully “solved”…which may be why I let the story gather dust for many months. Two are representatives from Raymarine who drove several hours to investigate why the boat’s new ST7002 control head and SPX30 course computer autopilot system was still making the owner very unhappy. The other two are employees of Wayfarer Marine, which had already put about ninety hours — some of it uncharged — into what had seemed at first to be a simple replacement needed because the boat’s original Raymarine 300 course computer (manual PDF still available) stopped turning in one direction. Anyone with an autopilot, or concerns about the cost of marine electronics, might want to know more about what happened…
Chirp fishfinding, Garmin & Simrad in Miami
Despite a fair bit of reporting on MIBS 2011 (Google search here), I failed to discuss what I saw during the back-to-back demonstrations of chirp fishfinding just before the show. In a word, it WORKS! All the writers — many of whom do a lot more fishing than I do — seemed to agree that they’d never before seen the target resolution imaged by both the Garmin GSD 26 and the Simrad BSM-2. And in some cases — like the fishy wreck near the Miami Harbor entrance above — we got to see both implementations of chirp in almost identical situations…
IsatPhone Pro does data, XGate a must?
I briefly tested the IsatPhone Pro last summer, later we enjoyed the “independent study” war, and recently Inmarsat announced that the phone can now be used as a narrow bandwidth modem when attached via USB...
The Marine Installer’s Rant, what’s your favorite?
Admittedly, that vessel immediately makes me think of Reese Witherspoon’s moderately immortal line in the moderately famous 1996 black comedy Freeway
Simrad NSS, hand’s on #1
I’ve already written about the debut of Simrad NSS “touch sensible” MFDs, as well as some of what I learned about Navico in Spain, and today I’ll discuss some of what I saw during the on-water demos. I was especially curious as to how the NSS replaces the NSE’s super fast direct access keys. Actually, I don’t think it’s possible to swap screens faster, or easier, than those NSE dedicated Chart, Echo, Radar, etc. buttons, which get you last-layout-used with a quick press and a list of available layouts with long press. But the NSS comes fairly close…
Northwest Passage with Starpath, plus its nav rules app
Twenty-three days on a Russian ice breaker following Roald Amundsen’s 1903 route through the Northwest Passage? Hell, yes, especially with David Burch — navigator extraordinare, and founder of Starpath — riding along as tutor and guide to the vessel’s bridge. If I had the money and the time (heck, it took Amundsen three years), I’d seriously consider this opportunity. For one thing, the venerable Kapitan Khlebnikov is going back into government service, and this may be her last Passage passage. And for another, the high latitudes — where compasses, celestial navigation, and even many forms of modern communications all get dicey — are what nav-obsessed gents like Burch live for…
Ultimate open MFD, or Ethernet monstrosity?
The PopGuard MFD from ShenShau electronics — a Panbo exclusive, and not yet online — may be just the thing for those who desire an Ethernet
centric MFD, a seriously open architecture, and/or the ability to run
applications of your choice from any one of five different operating
systems including Android and iOS. It may also be just what your
looking for to extend your favorite iPhone or iPad application to a
sunlight viewable display, manage streaming audio to your cockpit
speakers, or play movies cached into 60GB of high speed solid
state storage…
