The Marine Electronics Hub
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...
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…
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?…
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…
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…
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”…
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…
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…
When I came across the New Jersey Star Ledger’s finely reported series on the sinking of the scallop dragger Lady Mary, I didn’t stop reading until I’d finished all five chapters, watched the video, and done some further investigating. It may not sound like a story in the holiday spirit, but aren’t we about to gather during the darkest days of the year to celebrate light and love? You’re not apt to forget the loving extended family at the center of this dark tragedy. And you’ll certainly be reminded about how so many SAR gadgets and systems might and might not work…
At first glance Standard Horizon’s new CPN may look like a fairly standard multifunction display, but note the “turn page” screen graphic at lower right, the small (but purportedly powerful sounding) stereo speakers, and the “Multimedia Chart Plotter” designation. The 7- and 10-inch CPNs have touch screens not only to help manage charting, optional radar, and so forth but also to select audio and video entertainment stored on front or back connected USB sources, or streaming over WiFi. And, yes, there is a Web browser in there too!
