Standard Horizon 2011, new everything!
Today Standard Horizon formally announced a pant load of new VHF and MFD products. Most feature good, if incremental, changes; many have already have been shown at the Fall boat shows; and some are...
Panbo News and Reviews
Steve Dashew’s IMO radar, an AIS myth resurfaces
Oh my. This morning an email alerted me to this photo of an AIS Display Filter menu on a Furuno IMO-class FAR-2117 radar, and Steve Dashew’s understandable misunderstanding of what it means. The seductive myth that ships have the technology to completely ignore Class B AIS transponders is back! And the comments that follow demonstrate just how destructive that myth is, like: “Wow. That is really disturbing. I am sure it is something that the
manufacturers of Class B transceivers don’t want us to know. I have been
waiting for the Vesper Marine transceiver to become available – I might
opt for the receive only unit now and save some $$$.” Here’s the truth: No matter how that display filter is set, the 2117 radar will continue to track all AIS targets and will automatically display a filtered one — in flashing red, with a buzzer, even! — if it should enter the watch keeper’s area of collision concern, which is exactly how the IMO intends to improve big ship AIS monitoring!…
Simrad SonicHub, hand’s on #1
An interesting gadget I tested a bit on Gizmo before her late haul out (tomorrow, actually) is the Simrad (and Lowrance) SonicHub “Marine Audio Server” discussed here in May. I’m pretty impressed so far. The screen above may be a bit disconcerting because the NSE had a little trouble displaying the (difficult) title of the iTunes TV show I’d selected (which should read, “El espectáculo ¡Seamos saludables ahora! (The Get Healthy Now Show)”) and Elmo seems disjointed in the particular frame captured (though the video looked fine in motion), but I’m now confident about the concept. That is to say, I can arrive at the boat with all sorts of music and video on an iPod or iPhone, stick the device safely away in the SonicHub dock, and then manage it from any NSE (or NSO) on the boat’s SimNet/N2K network. And of course there’s more…
Navionics Mobile 5.0/1.0, sorting it out
This is going to confuse people! Navionics has refreshed all its mobile apps, but in two different ways, and they’re not done yet. The iPhone versions seen in the top panel are marked NEW!...
Geek Squad, the biggest marine electronics installer?
While the currently advertised marine services sound modest, the Geek Squad has major ambitions regarding the marine electronics installation business. To be more specific, they hope to eventually have installers based at some 450-500...
Future SAR gadgets, what are you hoping for?
The illustration above and the term “SAR gadgets” are both borrowed from the final issue of On Scene, published until 2009 by the USCG Office of Search and Rescue (downloads here). But no worries, On Scene is now a blog, and hence the times-they-are-a’changing illustration, which also serves well for a Panbo entry about evolving SAR gadgets. On Monday, I’ll be speaking to a group of companies developing SAR communications equipment along with representatives of the agencies that regulate such gear and the ones like USCGSAR which answer the calls. My task is to articulate what boaters may want to see in future SAR gadgets, and I’d like your help…
NMEA 2000 Bridges #1, they’re coming
So what the dickens is a NMEA 2000 bridge and why would you want one? Well, I think the answers are complicated enough, and important enough, that they deserve two entries. Mystic Valley Communications, the small company that produced the prototype above, describes its bridge as an “intelligent connection between two electrically isolated NMEA 2000 networks that copies transmitted data between the two networks.” Obviously, then, this is another way to deal with the backbone power issues discussed here in the past; with a bridge you can have two N2K networks that act as one in terms of data but are independent in terms of supplying power to devices, and in terms of a power failure. But the Mystic Valley brochure (unfortunately not online yet) goes on to claim that the bridge can also be used to increase the number of devices and drop lengths beyond what’s allowed for a single backbone. How is that possible?…
Cangarda, the touchscreen steam yacht
Camden Harbor is pretty quiet these days, but on Monday afternoon — while I was stripping off electronics prior to Gizmo’s inevitable haulout — Cangarda, the only existing U.S.-built steam yacht, suddenly slipped around the corner and silently maneuvered onto the Wayfarer dock just ahead of me. Yesterday I was further thrilled when Capt. Steve Cobb himself showed me around, paying special attention to his beloved engine room, where he’d fired up the boiler in order to check that the “water chemistry” was proper for lay up. You see, I already knew a fair bit about Cangarda, though I’d never seen the 126 foot vessel in all her awesome flesh before…
BEP CZone seen live, more coming
I wrote about BEP’s CZone distributed power last April, but didn’t get to see it live until I got a ride aboard Simrad’s demo boat during the Fort Lauderdale show. Isn’t it neat that the control screen can show you the amperage flowing through a specific circuit (and apparently detect a fault)? And if it’s on an MFD, couldn’t valuable details like that also be on iPad or apps phone like I recently saw live with Maretron’s N2KView? In April I also wrote about what a difficult niche distributed power is, but I still think the magic of digital switching is one of the most interesting frontiers in marine electronics. And that we’re going to hear a lot more about it in 2011. BEP, for instance, made a series of announcements during METS…
BGAN on a boat? A test in Hawaii
A question I’ve never known the answer to: Can a cruiser use Inmarsat’s BGAN service — the much less expensive “land” version of Fleet Broadband — at least when at anchor in an exotic...
