How cool is this! Most of the time we were hiking Long Island over the last two days I had Navionics Mobile 2.2 (East Coast) running on the iPhone and in track mode. Thus I could use it to check our progress against the trail map (downloadable here). I also took some iPhone photos of the mossy rich and rugged scenery from within Mobile, which then geo positions them on the chart. That's all neat, but the true kicker is that I could easily email the whole track with (reduced) photos to anyone as a KMZ file (only 248k, downloadable here) that can be overlaid on Google Earth as shown above. Or, with only two touch commands, could post it all on my Facebook page, where it seems to link to a Navionics-served Google Maps file which you may be able to see even if you don't have Google Earth or don't know beans about Facebook (like me). This easy track and photo sharing is great, but in fact the iPhone has been useful in many ways on this cruise...
"The fog was so thick that..." is a popular line here on the coast of Maine, especially this summer. Well, it was so foggy yesterday morning that we didn't actually see this can buoy until it was just a little over a boat length ahead, and, yes, as the photo suggests, it was so glassy gray calm that fog and Bay blended into blank oneness. But the amazing thing, I thought, was that the new Raymarine Digital 18" radome I'm testing captured this can about 3/4's of a mile away and held it tight and clear almost right to that boat length visibility distance. These are great days for real radar testing...
Well, that was exciting. Yesterday afternoon I went out on the Bay aboard Spirit of Zopolite, in large part so Capt. Bruce Kessler could show me how well his new Furuno 4-foot UHD radar works in close quarters now that he's seen Navico's Broadband Radar. And he was right; once away from the dock, the NavNet3D screen was resolving the complications of Camden Harbor very well indeed. The photo above, worth examining large (click on it), shows us returning via the channel through the Outer Harbor moorings, with almost all the boats and shoreline sharply resolved at quarter mile scale, and we could have gone down to 1/8th mile. I've been in this spot many times when you couldn't see anything except an occasional channel bouy or vague boat shadow, and it's interesting to compare the image with BR24 screens taken a few weeks ago...
Breeze Pleeze has received nearly half of her new NMEA 2000 backbone, actually two of them, and I thought I would describe the thinking behind my network design.
Ray C140W Deck Pod install, a dubber's impressions
Jul 21, 2009
Yes, I'm frustrated that a combination of weather, travel, and gizmo glitches has so far prevented me from getting this Raymarine C140W and the attached RD418D Digital Radar operational, and then comparing it with Navico Broadband Radar (and Garmin HD radomes, too), but it was educational to install the MFD in that new Scanstrut Deck Pod. The completed rig is quite slick: the "silver" finish goes nicely with Ray gray, I think; all the cables pass easily, and invisibly, through the base; and the whole pod angle adjusts smoothly but locks up solid with that lever (which, after a little tweaking, now goes tight against the base when locked). But putting it altogether was a little challenging...
Cobra MR HH475: floats, rewinds, burps, & does bluetooth cell
Jul 18, 2009
Here's Bill Boudreau of Cobra Electronics showing off the two new floating 6 watt handheld VHFs the company announced earlier this week. The higher end model, the MR HH475, includes the Rewind-Say-Again audio recording feature I liked a lot in the original HH425 and the fixed F80. Plus this handset can also double as a Bluetooth handset for your cell phone, much like Cobra's dedicated MR F300 Bluetooth speaker mic. It doesn't have some of the mic's features, like a built-in address book, but it does have the PTT/VOX choice and the noise cancellation that tested so well in my lab. But what if someone hails you on VHF while you're chatting on your phone?
Lowrance demonstrated its new StructureScan system in Orlando yesterday, with a surprise added feature. As expected, a high-frequency, very-narrow-beam transducer collects bottom info on each side of the boat and builds an almost photographic, though somewhat distorted, image as you move along. In the picture above (click for big version), we've chosen to display only the curious structure on the left side of our track. In other words, in that left window our boat is at the top right corner and the window shows the water column and bottom extending out about 70 feet to our left and about 200 behind us. The lower right window is normal Broadband Sonar image, derived from a separate transducer, but that upper right window is something different, as is the structure being imaged...
That's Eric Braitmayer, Imtra's marketing guy, and he's got lots to be happy about. The years of having to carefully explain the relative pros and cons of LED and halogen marine lighting are over. He's confident that the Ventura PowerLED upper left is as bright as a similar size 20 watt halogen fixture while being fully dimable (without RFI issues), much cooler, and much, much more power efficient. In fact, Imtra is phasing out of halogen lighting altogether, and recently announced significantly increased LED sales despite the 'downturn'. In other words, lots of boaters and boatbuilders apparently agree with Imtra that LED technology has advanced beyond the confusion area. Not that I would just go buy any old LED...
I'm not sure why I get such a kick out of fractured marketing copy, but I do. And I want to honor the energetic entrepreneur who's been trying hard to advertise the Mumbai Yacht Club via Panbo comments (even if I haven't let them go up). To "The Ownership Economic entails endless technical tensions of Man-management-n- Maintenance, Berthing, etc..." could we not add interfacing NMEA 2000 and 0183, making marine WiFi work, etc., etc.? And if I ever get back to the southwest coast of India, which I'd truly love to do, I might actually try to rent one of the "club's" yachts...
Garmin announced a slew of new products yesterday, the most innovative of which is probably the black box VHF 300 AIS. I think that this is not only the first combination VHF radio and AIS receiver (aside from the mod Icom UK apparently came up with), but also the first AIS receiver with NMEA 2000 output. While there are a couple of issues with N2K AIS target messages right now, I'm confidant they'll be fixed soon, and this will become the way to go. For instance, a Garmin plotter should
easily be able to "direct dial" AIS targets, buddies included, using
N2K. But that's not all to like about this radio...
The above screenshot is from the online version of my first Yachting column. I wasn't tickled that the print title, The Gizmo Manifesto, got changed (to better attract search engines, supposedly), but the text is all there as written, and I hope you'll check it out. I turned it in before actually taking possession of Gizmo the vessel, but my notions of what's possible for her electronics, and fears of the complications I might run into, are materializing. My June column on Monitoring is also online, and overall I'm getting in a happy groove with Yachting and the other Bonnier marine pubs I work with. But perhaps you can help make these magazines better...
Here's hoping that American panbots had a wonderful holiday weekend, and that northern hemisphere readers everywhere are enjoying the boating season. I'm pleased to report that blue skies are finally breaking out here in Maine. Friday night's harbor fireworks were pretty sad -- even those of us out in boats could only see vague glows in the fog -- but there were times on the 4th that flags dried out enough to flutter. And isn't Gizmo looking good? I still haven't gotten around to changing the name lettering yet, but as an electronics test bed -- and a cruising celebration of independence -- she's really coming along...
Since we're already discussing the Navico BR24, let's take a look at an interesting disagreement that's cropped up regarding its safety claims. At introduction, Navico's CEO called this low wattage solid state technology "a huggable radar" -- i.e. without any radiation danger whatsoever. But how dangerous are conventional magnetron marine radars in this size range? In the July issue of PMY, the new electronics editor Tim Bartlett tries to answer that question, and concludes, "So rest easy. While your microwave oven could theoretically cook you, a
small radar can't because it doesn't transmit long enough or with
enough power." Navico disagrees...
The weather here -- a phenomenal run of rain and fog -- has been great for testing the Broadband Radar temporarily installed on Li'l Gizmo, and I promise a screenshot show soon. But I've realized that while I've used many radars, and seen many others demonstrated, I've never had one on my own boat, and thus am not dead sure that the performance I'm seeing is as amazing as it seems. How convenient, then, that the indomitable Spirit of Zapolite cruised in out of the murk on Monday, complete with a brand new Furuno NavNet 3D system swinging a 4' Ultra High Definition array. That's the indomitable Capt. Kessler above, trying to tune NN3D/UHD to get as crisp and detailed an image of Camden Inner Harbor as he'd just seen on a 14-foot outboard!
