Wireless multifunction display?
Just got a note from a beloved, though former, in-law who’s wicked frustrated in his quest to find the right radar/plotter for his classic sail boat. The Raymarine C80 would do the trick, except for all the “damn cables”:
“There are at least three of them to allow for radar, gps, and power, and more if you want more instruments. And these are not lightweight lamp cords, either: the C-series specs tell us to allow 8″ clearance behind the instrument for the radar cable. Absurd. And it really ties down the unit to a very fixed mount, which is my ultimate objection. I’d like to have it mounted at the nav station, but be able to swing it out to the cockpit at need. It’s possible, but with all those heavy cables, very clumsy and inelegant.”
He wonders if there is a black box solution with wireless display? There is the Panasonic MDWD and other untethered PC solutions, not to mention some really interesting wireless instruments coming from the likes of TackTick and Deep Blue Marine, but a real marine portable multifunction display doesn’t really exist…yet. The good news is that most of the big boys—Furuno, Northstar, Garmin, and Raymarine—now use Ethernet to connect multiple displays, which means a WiFi connection is quite possible. (My “it could be worse” photo shows one locker on the bridge of a mega yacht under construction in Italy.)
