Tip of the hat to Scuttlebutt for today’s kind News Brief about Panbo. It’s been crazy here, it’s Friday, and I’m going to keep it quite light. So meet LightCap, a 32 oz water jug with a solar panel, Ni-Cad battery pack, and both red and white LEDs built into its top. It sounds like a foolish thing but I’m liking the prototype Sollight sent over. You can’t quite read by it but there’s a wonderful shimmer created by the light passing through the water, which also gives it some stay-put heft. LightCap could definitely add a little more magic to a balmy summer evening spent relaxing in the cockpit.
Do unto others dept: visit Zephyr, a newish blog pleasantly probing “sailing culture for voyagers, zealots, poets and populists”.
Alrighty, then, it’s Uniden Day. While getting links for the earlier entry, I spotted this new Bluetooth cordless phone system that just might be terrific for bigger yachts. The key feature is connectivity between a Bluetooth cell phone and the base station which supports up to 10 cordless handsets. Hence you could tuck your precious cell away on the boat, safe from saltwater and preferably connected to an amp and high gain marine antenna. Bluetooth headsets are also supported, which means that some yachties may eventually look like those guys at the airports with blue LEDs blinking on their ears.
I actually think that the most important innovations in marine networking are happening over wires — Ethernet and NMEA 2000 wires — but some of the wireless happenings certainly are, er, sexy. I tested Uniden’s first WHAM wireless mic and, while it worked OK, the screen was hard to read and the overall build quality didn’t impress. Now I’ve seen a prototype of the second generation WHAM and it is a whole new animal. Not only does the screen look very readable, but it now has greater range and function. It seems possible that you’ll be able to wander anywhere on a boat, and maybe a ways down the docks, easily carrying full power (25W) VHF and intercom capabilities. I’m supposedly on the list to try a couple of WHAMs, along with the interesting UM625c (for color) fixed radio, soon.
Hot words about NMEA 2000 were tossed into a recent rec.boats.electronics thread:
“Oh, boy! Another proprietary, improperly documented, non-standard data protocol designed to keep the marine electronics assholes swimming in money for another decade...”
Yike! I believe that every phrase and implication — heck, every word — in that diatribe is wrong, though I do understand the frustration of hobbyists and small developers who want the same access to NMEA 2000 that they have to 0183. But 0183 can not do what needs to be done on today’s boats, at least not easily. For an example of “not easily” check out the data system on Steve Dashew’s new boat, mentioned earlier, especially the bigger version of the diagram below. I’ll be posting a lot about 2000 in future weeks as I test some interesting gear.
SSB SailMail, Sat C, GSM phones using GPRS data, Iridium, marina WiFi, Internet Cafes (“Curses to French keyboards!”), online banking, malicious spyware — damn, some long range cruisers are becoming IT professionals. Yesterday, SetSail.com put up a series of “Sailor Logs” on the topic of “Staying in Touch & Paying the Bills While Cruising”. Very interesting stuff from 5 cruisers in different parts of the world. Among other things, I learned that Iridium now has $1/minute pre-paid SIM cards and — they’re popping up everywhere — Australia has a marina WiFi service.
SetSail is the work of Steve and Linda Dashew (and family), and it’s loaded with content. In fact you can get lost. Do check out the radical cruising powerboat that the Dashews will soon launch in New Zealand. Sometimes called FPB for Fast Pilot Boat, sometimes “The Unsailboat”, it is wired.
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.)
Yesterday KVH announced that ISDN (by-the-minute data) service for its big Fleet 77 Inmarsat communications systems is going from 64 to 128 kilobits per second. And hence “with KVH's exclusive Velocity™ Acceleration software, broadband data connections as fast as 500 Kbps - roughly the speed of residential DSL or cable Internet service - can be achieved, depending on network traffic and the data being transmitted.” The release says that existing F77 systems are compatible with the upgrade, and seems to imply that 128 Kbps will be charged differently than 64, though the new rates aren’t yet on KVH’s Inmarsat Airtime sheet (a PDF file here). It’s amazing how connected a deep sea vessel can be these days, but the difference between the hardware and costs involved and what’s happening on land, or near to land, remains profound. Some coastal cruisers complain about high power marina WiFi services that cost about $10 per day while Inmarsat ISDN is $7 per minute. And boats using satellite Internet have to be careful about leaving computers online or letting programs like Windows automatically download updates. A few years ago I attended (and wrote about) a communications seminar where several mega yacht captains spoke of accidental $50,000/month Inmarsat bills!
Another important feature of the new Max and Platinum chart card formats I wrote about earlier today is their vastly expanded POI (Points of Interest) databases. Click on an icon and you can find out a marina’s phone #, services offered, and much more. Ditto for hotels, grocery stores, and other services. One electronics wag predicts that eventually we’ll be able to check out the menu at a dock-and-dine restaurant before we tie up. But this stuff is not entirely new. Contemporary paper charts don’t include POI info, but old time cartographers were often artful with it. The snip below is just a couple of square inches from a panoramic of the New York City waterfront that fills one corner of a 1685 chart of New England. Many points of interest are labeled with letter keys, including the gallows (G), illustrated in use! Click here for a larger image of the chart (a new Panbo feature). I’ll write an entry soon on where to find high resolution antique chart images like this on the Web.
Why do C-Map’s full page ads for its new Max chart format feature a woman wearing a cartographic body suit? Even the model looks like she thinks it a goofy idea! Especially since Max has so many interesting and graphic new features — panoramic photos of harbor entrances, animated tidal current predictions and navigation light characteristics, street mapping, 15 levels of land contours and 32 of depth (now in 256 colors), and a perspective view that let’s a navigator see chart detail up close to the boat while still keeping an eye on what’s further ahead. And none of it has been seen on plotters before. C-Map has a dedicated Max site here. I wrote about Max and Navionics’ new Platinum format (not much on the Web yet) for the June issues of PMY and Sail, and we tried to use as many illustrations as possible. I think that both new formats are sexy, but not literally!
I’ve learned a lot about how boaters are using WiFi along the our coasts, and it’s darn exciting. Savvy folks are using the Internet to the max for fun, work, and even cruise planning (weather, slip reservations, etc.) using fast wireless connections, either free or from dedicated marine services, in anchorages and marinas from the Abacos to the Straits of Georgia. You won’t hear much about this in the marine press because it’s kind of a helter skelter scene with very few big players.
Yet a clear key to success is good equipment. You might find an occasional hotspot using Centrino built in WiFi and standard Windows XP WiFi software but you’ll do a whole lot better with a high power (200 mw) WiFi card or USB device connected to a high gain (6–12 db) 2.4 GHz omnidirectional antenna with low loss LMR400 coax cable and some decent WiFi software (like the free program available from Boingo). You won’t find this stuff at Staples! And so far hardly any regular marine electronics outlets have gotten into this market. Places to look for long range WiFi gear are: Broadband Express, a Pacific Northwest marine service provider (gear shown); MarineNet, a Florida marine communications outfit; and HyperLink Technologies, a commercial all-things-wireless equipment vendor (where there’s also great detail on which cards use which connectors, etc.).
Heck, let’s make this Jeffrey Siegel day at Panbo. You see what I didn’t mention below is that Siegel is also the developer of Maptech’s Outdoor Navigator, an excellent PDA (Palm and PPC) charting program that I wrote about back in early 2002 and which has recently evolved in very interesting ways. I thought it was a pretty good deal at $100 with a year access to all the U.S. charts or topos you wanted to download, but now ON costs a mere $20 and you can keep downloading maps as long as you own the PDA it’s registered to. ON also now works on "Smartphones" using Microsoft's cell operating system. The phones from Audiovox, Motorola, and others do not have touch screens, so all ON's controls have been neatly moved to the keypad. Jeff, who naturally is cruising with all versions of his creation, notes that the lack of a touchscreen is one reason why his smartphone has an extra long battery life. He also notes how useful ON is just as a chart reference tool, no messing with a GPS, especially as Maptech corrects the charts on their servers every month. The whole ON story is here.
I was talking to the anchorage in Key West again last night, only this time I was using the remarkable over-the-Internet phone service Skype. I just had to dig out an old computer headset/mic, download Skype’s easy software, and I was registered, tested, and ready to make calls in minutes. Now I feel like the last geek on earth to discover Skype (free PC to PC calls, modest charges to SkypeOut to actual phones)—there are 2.5 million users online as I type this!
What got my attention was learning from Jeffrey Siegel that cruisers are happily using Skype in places like the Bahamas where WiFi Internet connections are fairly common, but cell phone service expensive and/or complicated. Jeff is a terrific resource; for instance, he’s currently cruising the East Coast with high power WiFi gear and two cell phones with different services and data plans, and he’s sharing his findings with mutts like me, not to mention the denizens of the Trawlers & Trawlering E-Mail List. Jeff and Karen make their home port (below) near me in Maine and I profiled them for the first issue of Voyaging last fall. I’ve been researching marine WiFi recently and Jeff has been a big help, including my experience with real off-the-boat Skype last night. I thank him.
Another item in the May PMY is my test of WeatherWave, a neat service that delivers NOAA alerts to your cell phone and also lets you dial up specific forecasts and buoy reports. I note that it will work on any phone because its servers convert NOAA text to voice. That’s in contrast to Ekkosoft’s MarineWeather, another clever service that translates NOAA alerts and forecasts into informative graphics (right). You do need to be using Verizon Wireless on a handset that supports “Get It Now” applications, but I was very impressed with the results when I tried it. Both services can get a boater just what they need from NOAA’s vast weather resources…without having to wait through a long and tedious VHF loop.
Last night my May PMY electronics column went up on the magazine’s Web site, one of the first up for this issue for some reason (probably random). I don’t think there’s another boating magazine on the planet that publishes so much of its content to the Web so quickly, not to mention so well. I’m one writer who really appreciates it (there are some freelancers who fear that Web publishing will lead to theft of their work, but that’s another subject).
At any rate, the column is about the U.S. Coast Guard’s new search and rescue communications system, called Rescue 21. It’s going to be extremely powerful, but has suffered recent delays, which come on top of previous delays. Naming it after a century—instead of a year like NMEA 2000, also powerful but also slow to really happen—was a good idea.
Yes, those two guys in a Santana 22 were damned surprised to find themselves surfing a big wave under San Francisco’s Golden Gate bridge, and no doubt the real surfer in the water was surprised to see them. What happened next is unforgettable, as are the series of photos (this included) taken by Wayne Lambright and generously served on his site (specific picture link here). Sail’s Kimball Livingston has also done a terrific writeup of the incident, including after words from the two crew, who were shaken up but not seriously injured.
Apparently Lambright’s site has almost been overpowered by umpteen Web surfers wanting to see his photos since the April 2 incident, so please be patient and also support his real work if possible. And, yes, this entry is off topic, but interesting, right?
The author Thomas Friedman is making waves with his notion that our world has gotten so small that it seems flat again. I certainly see it in my little marine electronics world. One day I’m watching AIS equipped ships in Amsterdam Harbor, another I’m following scullers as they glide by a marina in Vancouver, Canada. All from my desk in Maine. And when I say “following”, I mean I’m actually operating a pan, tilt, and zoom camera with my Web browser. The camera is mounted in the cockpit of a test vessel belonging to a company called EyeOnBoard, which is using marina WiFi to give yacht owners (and its own 24/7 response center) amazing Web access to their vessels. The cameras are cool, but more important are all the sensors distributed around the boat. Take a look at this screen in the live demo (which understandably does not include the camera control). EyeOnBoard customers also benefit from the monitoring, and WiFi Internet access, when they’re aboard.
The evidence is piling up, so to speak. Last night I spoke with a friend anchored off Key West who said he and his very able 53’ trawler were delayed there by heavy seas. Now I’m listening to a guy on CNN describing how his cruise ship honeymoon in the Bahamas got messed up (the on deck Jacuzzis got washed away, amongst other problems), and the damage done to another ship off Georgia is all over the news. “When the wave passed -- some estimates have it higher than 60 feet -- two windows on decks nine and 10 of the 15-story ship were blown out, 62 cabins sustained water damage and four people were treated for cuts and bruises aboard the ship.”
I went over to NOAA’s Ocean Prediction Center to see what happened (above), and discovered that the site now has a nice “looping” function for reviewing forecast and analysis graphics.
This is the first NMEA 0183 multiplexor I know of that can automatically switch to a back up input for any one of three reasons — “a failure to send any NMEA data, an invalid NMEA sentence checksum, or if the validity flag(s) contained within the NMEA sentence indicate that this data is not valid and should only be used with caution (for GPS and Depth data)”. In other words, you could have 4 GPSs (or, more likely 2 GPSs and 2 sounders) feeding the best available data to, say, a plotter and a PC…no manual backup switches needed. Very slick. Actisense’s site has lots of good information on the NSW-1, and it’s available for 260 pounds from at least one English online retailer (the U.S. distributor is Gem Electronics, 843–394–3565).
ACR sent out a press alert about the first rescue credited to its relatively new GPS equipped Personal Locator Beacon. I can’t find any other Web references to the incident, which involved a pair of divers off Bradenton, Florida, but it certainly sounds like ACR and the whole SARSAT system have something to brag about. The little beacon was set off “around 7pm”, seen by a GOES Satellite at 6:58pm, sent up a GPS fix at 7:01pm (presumably from a cold start), and a Coast Guard 41 footer had steamed 10 plus miles to the scene by 8:10pm. It wasn’t until 7:47 that the LEOSAR satellites could resolve the beacon’s location by the standard Doppler method, a delay that might have cost a life in this case. Hat’s off to ACR’s apparently speedy GPS PLB technology and to the fast SARSAT dispatch system! Here’s an article I wrote about SARSAT last year, ACR’s AquaFix site, and an early look at these units by Doug Ritter at the Equipped to Survive Foundation (which will hopefully conduct a thorough test of current PLBs soon).
Writing the entry below I realized that there doesn’t seem to be a picture of the sailboat WeatherStation model on the Web, and there should be! Astute observers will note that a French company, LCJ Capteurs, has offered a CV3F ultrasonic wind sensor for some time. In fact, Airmar licensed this solid-state design, and then reportedly improved it—adding a little heater to protect against extreme ice/snow interference and an inclinometer to correct for heeling errors. The developers at Airmar also threw in a fluxgate compass for true wind direction calculation, and even an LED lit Windex indicator for sailors who like to sometimes look aloft instead of at a screen (and/or like having a non electronic back up). The WeatherStation, which will cost about $1,000, can also sense air temperature, barometric pressure, and more, and can supposedly collect some history on its own. The intriguing device manages to squeeze all this info into one cable and the NMEA 0183 protocol, but a coming NMEA 2000 model will be better at data distribution. No instrument or display manufacturer has yet announced a product that will make the most of this sensor, but no doubt several are working on it. Airmar has not posted any product specs on its site yet, or I couldn’t find it!
“Let us now praise consumer electronics—the iPod, Palm Pilot, the computer and even the not-so-lowly TV set. Why? Because while virtually everything else in yachting becomes more costly, marine electronics consistently provide more value for your money, in large measure due to the use of the billions of dollars invested in consumer product technology.”
That’s how Chuck Husick begins his latest at Yachtingnet, an interesting look at new trends. Chuck’s piece led me to learn more about Organic Light-Emitting Diode (OLED) screens, like the prototype shown. Note that someone at Yachtingnet, probably not Chuck, mistakenly captioned the Airmar WeatherStation as wireless; it’s not, though it’s a fascinating product.
For a while now, a free registration at AISlive.com was possibly the best way to appreciate how valuable this anti-collision transponder technology actually is…short of, say, getting in trouble crossing the English Channel in zero visibility. AISlive has numerous coastal receivers listening for AIS messages, which it then charts on the Web in nearly real time. The screen shot below shows Amsterdam Harbor a few minutes ago. I’ve clicked on a boat called Unfurled and learned that it’s an 34m sailboat, one of the growing number AIS equipped yachts; Yme could probably stroll over and check it out! I can also go to the Straits of Dover, New York Harbor, and lots of other places and imagine how fabulous this information would be if I were cruising there right now (I wish).
But the IMO never contemplated Web broadcasting when it developed the AIS standard and some ships (and megayachts) apparently aren’t that pleased to see themselves so publicly tracked. There was talk of shutting AISlive down, but a much better resolution has been achieved. On May 3, what you see now on the site will become an expensive service limited to commercial and government subscribers. It’s an understandable change and the great news for us “private users/ship enthusiasts” is that “We have decided to create a public website (at our own cost) which is similar to the current AISLive but delayed by a minimum of one hour. We will not be charging for this service and hope you continue to enjoy the website.” Thank you, AISlive.com.
ConnectFest was one especially notable electronics event at a 2005 Miami Boat Show chock-a-block with the new and notable. NMEA rented a side room where something like 40 devices made by 12 different manufacturers were all connected into one NMEA 2000 backbone…and talking to each other. Members of the trade, press, and public all seemed dazzled by the possibilities. My photo shows a Raymarine E120 displaying data from multiple sources (I’m not even sure which engine, as there were several on line, but you’d know on your own boat). ConnectFest will make another appearance at the upcoming annual meeting of the Radio Technical Commission for Maritime Services (RTCM). I suspect that 2005 is the year that the unfortunately named NMEA 2000 standard really gets rolling.
Lowrance started talking about its new NauticPath electronic charts last fall, but the details — cost, which plotters they’ll run on, and “where the heck did Lowrance get them?” — are still resolving themselves. You may still find Web references to regional cards at $99 apiece, but it’s definite now that Lowrance will ship (very soon) all U.S. coastal charts on one card for $109 retail! And a new page at Lowrance says that the Great Lakes, Bahamas, Puerto Rico, and USVI are also included! The same page indicates that most every plotter in Lowrance’s fast-growing line will run these charts, though a firmware upgrade may be needed. So one sweet possibility is backing up a boat’s plotter system with an inexpensive waterproof handheld loaded with charts, and also able to play MP3 music! By the way, at a Miami Boat Show press conference, Lowrance allowed that NauticPath is based on the same Transas chart database that Nobeltec and Garmin licensed as the foundation of their electronic chart formats.
Lowrance has a phenomenal number of new products this year, and the specs on many of them will likely prompt more exclamation points here.
Isn’t it neat that a lot of boaters gleefully invent stuff to improve their vessels? A fairly extreme example is one Roger Jones who put together his own elaborate boat monitoring system, wrote the necessary software too, and then created a site where anyone can download this software for free and read Roger’s well written instructions about how to assemble the hardware from off-the-shelf parts. Roger’s screen shots indicate that Version 2, currently in “beta”, can not only mind batteries, AC power, pumps, lights, and NMEA 0183 nav data, but can also display weather buoy data (from where I don’t know) and video. Nice work, Roger! (By the way, I learned about this because Roger posted a message on our Electronics Forum at PMY).
Panasonic calls it a Toughbook MDWD, an awkward acronym for Mobile Data Wireless Display. Nobeltec simplified it to WND for Wireless Nobeltec Display. Whatever the name, this touch screen portable display is nifty technology, able to extend the usefulness of a “down below” PC to most anywhere on deck. Once you’ve added a WiFi transceiver (easy) and the included MDWD/WND drivers to the PC, you can run it remotely with a stylus or even a finger tip. The weather resistant wireless display even comes with a wrist strap. I tested one a couple of years ago and was impressed with how readable the 8.4” screen was, even in difficult light. Now Nobeltec is offering a new MK2 model ($1,900) that is purportedly even brighter, and has a longer battery life. Nobeltec is also now stocking extra battery packs and an AC adapter.
Garmin’s new 192C plotter and 198C plotter/sounder come with full detail BlueCharts for all U.S. coastal waters, including Alaska and Hawaii, loaded in non-volatile memory and ready to use! This is remarkable news because until now you had to also buy either chart cards or a CD with which you burned your own chart card. Either way, getting charts for, say, a trip down the East Coast could cost more than the total $964 price tag on the 192C, and was more hassle. One possible downside of the pre-loaded charts is that you won’t have a card or CD that you can use with a backup plotter. It’s also not clear how Garmin will update these charts, or if they will work via USB for planning on a PC. I look forward to trying one of these five-inch diagonal units, which also boast “a new look and feel”, in the near future.
Garmin’s charts-included strategy, which will likely come to other new models as they roll out (just guessing), is only one of several major changes in the world of electronic charts that I’ll try to touch on here over the next few weeks.
Ben Ellison here, pleased to introduce myself as the new editor of Panbo.com. Yme Bosma did a fine job of starting this weblog last year, and I’m pleased to report that he’s staying on to manage and grow the technology behind it. Between us, we hope to take advantage of this new medium to create a lively window into the fascinating and fast-moving world of marine electronics.
As for me, I’m a life-long boat guy — cruiser, delivery captain, navigation instructor, almanac editor, sucker for odd vessels, etc. etc. — who’s lived on the coast of Maine since buying an old 40’ wooden sloop here in 1971. Nowadays I’m the Electronics Editor for both Power & Motoryacht and Sail magazines (who owns and enjoys both kinds of boats). I’m also an advisor for Marine Electronics Journal and write columns for Voyaging and Maine Boats & Harbors. I’ve watched yacht and work boat navigation go from RDF and celestial to satellites and PCs, and am enthusiastic to see where the heck the technology is headed next. Yme and I hope you’ll join us as a reader and/or contributor to blog about it!
Tip of the hat to Scuttlebutt for today’s kind News Brief about Panbo. It’s been crazy here, it’s Friday, and I’m going to keep it quite light. So meet LightCap, a 32 oz water jug with a solar panel, Ni-Cad battery pack, and both red and white LEDs built into its top. It sounds like a foolish thing but I’m liking the prototype Sollight sent over. You can’t quite read by it but there’s a wonderful shimmer created by the light passing through the water, which also gives it some stay-put heft. LightCap could definitely add a little more magic to a balmy summer evening spent relaxing in the cockpit. 
I actually think that the most important innovations in marine networking are happening over wires — Ethernet and NMEA 2000 wires — but some of the wireless happenings certainly are, er, 
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 
Yesterday KVH 
Why do C-Map’s full page ads for its new Max chart format feature a woman wearing a cartographic body suit? Even the model looks like she thinks it a goofy idea! Especially since Max has so many interesting and graphic new features — panoramic photos of harbor entrances, animated tidal current predictions and navigation light characteristics, street mapping, 15 levels of land contours and 32 of depth (now in 256 colors), and a perspective view that let’s a navigator see chart detail up close to the boat while still keeping an eye on what’s further ahead. And none of it has been seen on plotters before. C-Map has a dedicated Max site 
I’ve learned a lot about how boaters are using WiFi along the our coasts, and it’s darn exciting. Savvy folks are using the Internet to the max for fun, work, and even cruise planning (weather, slip reservations, etc.) using fast wireless connections, either free or from dedicated marine services, in anchorages and marinas from the Abacos to the Straits of Georgia. You won’t hear much about this in the marine press because it’s kind of a helter skelter scene with very few big players. 
Heck, let’s make this Jeffrey Siegel day at Panbo. You see what I didn’t mention 
Another item in the May PMY is my 
Yes, those two guys in a Santana 22 were damned surprised to find themselves surfing a big wave under San Francisco’s Golden Gate bridge, and no doubt the real surfer in the water was surprised to see them. What happened next is unforgettable, as are the series of photos (this included) taken by Wayne Lambright and generously served on his 
The evidence is piling up, so to speak. Last night I spoke with a friend anchored off Key West who said he and his very able 53’ trawler were delayed there by heavy seas. Now I’m listening to a guy on CNN describing how his cruise ship honeymoon in the Bahamas got messed up (the on deck Jacuzzis got washed away, amongst other problems), and the damage done to another ship off Georgia is all over the 
This is the first NMEA 0183 multiplexor I know of that can automatically switch to a back up input for any one of three reasons — “a failure to send any NMEA data, an invalid NMEA sentence checksum, or if the validity flag(s) contained within the NMEA sentence indicate that this data is not valid and should only be used with caution (for GPS and Depth data)”. In other words, you could have 4 GPSs (or, more likely 2 GPSs and 2 sounders) feeding the best available data to, say, a plotter and a PC…no manual backup switches needed. Very slick. Actisense’s site has lots of good information on the 
ACR sent out a press 
Writing the entry 
“Let us now praise consumer electronics—the iPod, Palm Pilot, the computer and even the not-so-lowly TV set. Why? Because while virtually everything else in yachting becomes more costly, marine electronics consistently provide more value for your money, in large measure due to the use of the billions of dollars invested in consumer product technology.”
ConnectFest was one especially notable electronics event at a 2005 Miami Boat Show chock-a-block with the new and notable. NMEA rented a side room where something like 40 devices made by 12 different manufacturers were all connected into one NMEA 2000 backbone…and talking to each other. Members of the trade, press, and public all seemed dazzled by the possibilities. My photo shows a Raymarine 
Lowrance started talking about its new NauticPath electronic charts last fall, but the details — cost, which plotters they’ll run on, and “where the heck did Lowrance get them?” — are still resolving themselves. You may still find Web references to regional cards at $99 apiece, but it’s definite now that Lowrance will ship (very soon) all U.S. coastal charts on one card for $109 retail! And a new 
Isn’t it neat that a lot of boaters gleefully invent stuff to improve their vessels? A fairly extreme example is one Roger Jones who put together his own elaborate boat monitoring system, wrote the necessary software too, and then created a 
Panasonic calls it a Toughbook 
Garmin’s new 
Ben Ellison here, pleased to introduce myself as the new editor of Panbo.com. Yme Bosma did a fine job of starting this weblog last year, and I’m pleased to report that he’s staying on to manage and grow the technology behind it. Between us, we hope to take advantage of this new medium to create a lively window into the fascinating and fast-moving world of marine electronics. 