All hail Richard Brain. While the Consumer Electronics Show, year-end “best new…” lists and patent searches may all offer 2009 marine electronics possibilities, the real deal—mainly a passel of very interesting Raymarine preview products—is being shown at the London Boat Show. And Richard was kind enough to collect brochures, photograph them, and email them to me for your Panbo pleasure. So let’s thank Richard and say hello to Ray’s new “Widescreen” C Series, which is truly different from the original…
One enterprising, if anonymous, Panbot has apparently been searching out filings at the U.S. Patent Office, and discovered some interesting recent activity regarding Furuno Electric Co. and Forward Looking Sonar (FLS). You may recall that Furuno previewed the “FL-7000” at the NMEA Conference in 2005, but then scrapped the product, purportedly due to inconsistent performance. That entry and its comments demonstrate well my personal enthusiasm for improved FLS and the current state of the technology (valuable but limited, with ongoing incremental improvements). Well, patents are hard to read, and don’t necessarily mean much, but…
Aside from Panbo’s able crew of regular commenters—some of whom I’ve gotten to know personally, and all of whom I appreciate—the sixty thousand plus unique monthly visitors here are a somewhat mysterious mishmash of marine electronics enthusiasts, product info searchers, and trades people. (Feel free to speak up your own self, and apologies in advance for the somewhat cranky comment system, which will be improved in 2009.) Actually I also personally know a lot of folks in the trade who read Panbo regularly, and have been told that several companies have a designated monitor tasked with passing along relevant entries and comments to management. How 2009/Web 2.0 cool is that? And it means that if you’d like to express your wishes for the marine electronics future, you will be heard. Russ Irwin, proprietor of the data mishmash above, gets the first word (and credit as instigator):
That’s a Blackberry getting dunked in pan of water, which it apparently survives just fine, thanks to a new “vacuum deposited” polymer coating process called Golden Shellback. You can see the CNET video “Waterproof your gadgets” below, Gizmodo filmed a cell taking a call while in a glass of ice water, and Tekzilla had some fun with an iPhone. But I’m a little confused; all these tech sites talk about “waterproof” but Golden Shellback itself clearly calls its technology “splash proof.” Many of us know from handheld VHF history that there can be a big difference.
Smaller, faster, cheaper! I’m wondering if some of the new automobile computers, like this Jensen NVX3000PC, wouldn’t work pretty nicely on a boat. You got your built-in GPS, 7” touch screen, 30 gig drive, Windows XP, SD card slot, dual USB ports, 12v and li-ion power supplies…even WiFi and a remote control. There’s also the Azentek Atlas CPC-1000, which apparently adds AM/FM/Satellite/HD audio, a CDRW/DVD/MP3/WMA drive, Bluetooth, and CANbus integration. And no doubt there are others, at least concepts. I don’t know if any of these things are actually shipping, and I’ve heard that states like California are clamping down on how much computing you can do, or visual entertainment enjoy, while driving…which might impede developments. But isn’t some sort of inexpensive, mass market computer going to make sense afloat?
At this point in the year I like to cruise around the various “Best of” tech lists, mostly for geeky fun, but also looking for innovations that may eventually trickle down to the boating world. Like Popsci.com’s Innovation of the year, which is this flexible, light, and supposedly inexpensive Powersheet solar panel at right. Nanosolar started producing panels just before Christmas, and I’m wondering if they would hold up on Big Gizmo’s big cabin top? Popular Science has more of interest, including sun block that’s built into hand and face soap. Then there’s PC World’s 25 Most Innovative Products of 2007, where you’ll see a few products already Panboed, like the XO learning laptop, the Amazon Kindle, and the HP TouchSmart IQ770. And Cnet’s Best & Worse tech of 2007, where the “Best smartphone” is the very same AT&T Tilt I saw boat cell guru Jeff Siegel fondling recently (more on the nifty software he showed me coming soon). Plus who wouldn’t want to check out SciFi.com’s top 10 gadgets for the filthy rich, along with its many other lists, including “101…strangest…gadget gift guides”. So what lists did I miss, or, more to the point, what new general technologies are going to make boating life easier and more fun? (But please save your “most innovative new marine electronics” choices for a discussion to come.)
Yesterday I got to spend a few hours on a Navionics test boat tooling around Bass River, Cape Cod (unfortunately damnable cars and planes were also involved in the trip). A few of us boating writers got to fool with eight chart plotters, and see first hand what Navionics is up to for 2008 (very cool, but I can’t write about it just yet). Another highlight was spending time with company founder Giuseppe Carnevali. This is not the first demo cruise I’ve taken with this gentleman and I’ve come to appreciate his fathomless enthusiasm for cartography, the technologies that make it better, and boating. He’s been a creative force in marine electronics since he and Fosco Bianchetti developed the first vector charts in the early 80’s. Yesterday it occurred to me that with Bianchetti selling C-Map and Darrell Lowrance finally retired, Giuseppe is one of the last of his generation still pushing this field forward. And he’s going strong.
Continuing on about how we’ve just gotten started with electronic cartography, check out the demo video at Perceptive Pixel showing the developers exercising two handed control over Google Earth and other imagery. Then there’s Microsoft’s new “Surface Computing”—also “multi touch”—nicely presented by Popular Mechanics on this video. It sure seems possible that the ‘surface’ could be one wizbang chart table…eventually. Meanwhile, Google has introduced Maplets, which means that users can now contribute mini applications as well as content. And Michael “heywhatsthat” Kosowsky has already created three, two of which I used in the mashup below (and bigger here). One very usefully overlays Michael’s topo lines and the other guesstimates new shorelines if sea level rises. Just add 150 feet and I’ve got waterfront!
PS 7/18: “…a quantum leap from our 2d/3d apps like Google Earth”? Check out this video about Seadragon and Photosynth (thanks, John!).
Where is this bubbling geographic/Internet stew going to take us (like EarthNC), and, in particular, what the heck else is being created nearly under my nose (like ActiveCaptain)? The latest is a rather amazing service created by one Michael Kosowsky out in the Lincolnville hills west of Panbo HQ. It began with Michael wondering what distant bumps he was seeing from his yard and now--much programming later--he's inventor/proprietor of Hey, what's that. Check it out. Right off the bat you'll see what's what from Mt. Battie, which happens to be where I took the header photo of Camden Harbor above. You'll see it centered in Google Maps with each visible peak marked by an icon, along with a panorama view above and a list of the spots to the right, each interactively clickable. But you've just gotten started.
Today Garmin announced a slew of new tools meant to encourage third parties—commercial and otherwise—to interact every which way with Garmin hardware. I’m not a developer, but my quick read suggests that possibilities include writing a cell phone app that’ll get location from a Garmin GPS via Bluetooth; equipping a Web site with an easy way to up/down-load waypoints, routes, and tracks; creating a set of “Garmin Rich POIs” (GPI) from raw XML or GPX files; and more. In fact, it looks like Garmin is going to share some of the sophisticated software goodies it acquired with Motion Based, figuring, I guess, that even if other developers make something good enough to command subscriptions, Garmin will still get the hardware sales. But like I say I don’t really understand all the developer talk. So I’m hoping that those of you who do will check out the new site and report back.
It wasn’t surprising that Jeppesen Marine’s Miami press conference was meatier than Navico’s. Jep’s acquisition of C-Map had been through a many-month due diligence process and had already closed before the boat show. I came away thinking that existing C-Map customers, retail and OEM, have nothing to worry about, and that the products that evolve out of this combination are going to be interesting. For one thing, we were introduced to the new manager of the Recreational division, James Detar—to the left above, with Jeppesen Marine VP Tim Sukle and Nobeltec manager Shepard Tucker. Detar seems evolved for the task; he grew up in a Cape Cod boatyard, then went on to earn an advanced degree in cartography and work at C-Map for some 15 years, first in chart production, then business development. He even speaks fluent Italian. When asked if Jeppesen would change any of C-Map’s many existing OEM relationships, Detar said, very convincingly: “Absolutely not!” Sukle and Tucker described the overall vision of Jeppesen Marine, which is next generation charts/data/software (not hardware), both for OEM’s and their own products. Thus Nobeltec will help advance C-Map’s plotter OS much like it’s worked backstage on Simrad’s Glass Bridge and certain Northstar products. (I later spoke with a big C-Map OEM, and he’s excited). Tucker also described how Jeppesen is applying its massive resources to a set of Web services that will include facilities for users to share data, including POI info, with each other and the world. That made me smile.
Jeppesen, by the way, has a heck of a history. It didn’t seem to be in the movie (worth watching), but we were told that founder, and early mail pilot, Elrey Jeppesen famously said, “I didn’t do this to make money; I did it to stay alive!”
Some might quibble with “distinctively handsome profile”, but wow what a concept: 6 knots ‘free’ using 6,000 watts of photovoltaic panels laid on the (thus squarish) cabin tops and deck, but if you want to pick her up to 15 knots cruise (and/or the big AGM battery banks need topping up), the Mercedes diesel generators, living in sound proof chambers forward, kick in. This is more out-of-the-box thinking from Reuben Trane, who also put together the more subtly innovative Island Pilot I tried in August. He spoke about this hybrid idea with much enthusiasm, but I didn’t expect to see ads and a web site so soon. Needless to say, there will be a very interesting monitoring and control system on these boats.
Brunswick still hasn’t sold its BNT electronics division, but a big reason it might want to raise cash is becoming more apparent. Ever since the stock price popped a bit on the late April announcement, it’s been downhill sledding. And yesterday was awful as BC announced “significant” retail sales declines and plans to reduce production. (Overall this is not a good sign for the economy, or my business, though, wow, BC’s big boats are still selling.)
Meanwhile the rumors about who would buy BNT have pretty much died down…but Northstar/Navman seems to be chugging along just fine. In fact, I’ve got two folders of really interesting screen shots to share in the near future, and BNT ME recently announced a big sale of 8000i gear to Viking Yachts. (Whose sales may be just fine, because…oh, I don’t know…we’re living in the Roaring 00’s?)
The solid state disk (SSD), gotta be good for marine electronics
May 26, 2006
Let’s see, according to the Samsung press release, that little 32 gig solid state drive (SSD) she’s holding, used in the new laptop and UMPC, can take twice the impact of a regular shock resistant laptop HD, reads 300% faster, and runs much cooler (meaning that its easier to waterproof the surrounding box). Of course it’s a little pricey now, but won’t these be useful around an electronic helm? (credit: Gizmodo)
USCG finally kills LORAN?, hopefully a red herring
May 11, 2006
The May issue of BoatUS magazine has this “Action Alert”:
With no warning to users, the U.S. Coast Guard has proposed termination of the Loran system by requesting zero budget for Loran in its FY 07 budget request sent to Congress. This surprising development came with no stakeholders’ input and after the Coast Guard spent $160 million modernizing the Loran system, an improvement in signal strength, maintenance and coverage that is nearly complete.
Surprise, indeed! For years I’ve been telling folks that an improved Loran will return as a back-up to GPS. What gives? Well, I take solace in the rosy report currently on the opening page of the International Loran Association, well worth a read even if it predates the USCG announcement. According to the author—the inimitable and very credible Langhorne Bond, who I once interviewed for an article about GPS vunerability—Loran has proven itself the perfect complement to the satellite system for marine and aero navigation, not to mention precision timing (for power plants and much more). But he does note that fair allocation of the operating costs is an issue:
The Coast Guard pays the full operating costs and feels this is inequitable due to the future multi-model uses of LORAN.The Coast Guard is dead right, although the inter-agency discussion of this is likely to be gritty.
Gritty? Ah ha! I’m hoping that the CG budget surprise is not really about killing Loran, but about forcing other agencies to help pay for it. Still, we should all play our part. I’m taking BoatUS’s advice to write my congress people, only I’m adding a line about sharing the costs/giving the CG a break. I also plan to test the loaner eLoran I’ve been neglecting.
By the way, the picture, flushed out by Google images, is a Loran station on Attu in 1945. There’s even a bit of its history online. The USCG has been at this for some time.
On April 25th Brunswick formally promoted David Ritblatt from general manager to president of BNTME , and then two days later announced that BNT was for sale! How much did Ritblatt know and when did he know it? Why is Brunswick selling? Ritblatt responds to this general line of enquiry with some joking about being “in the dark” himself. I’m not sure about that, but I do see his point that as long as BNTME is healthy things are going to work out. Here are more aphorism-sprinkled points he made in our conversation last Friday:
* He stands by his MEJ predictions about developing an even closer relationship with Brunswick boat builders, “The planned sale of BNT Marine Electronics will not impact Brunswick’s strategy to integrate marine electronics. It is not necessary to manufacture Northstar and Navman products to integrate them into Brunswick boats.” Or: “You don’t need to own the cow to get a nice glass of milk.”
* He noted that BNTME just had its best month ever, including a 40% sales increase, and says he’s ‘honored’ by the many ‘interesting’ companies considering an acquisition. “They wouldn’t be hunting like this if the meat wasn’t tasty.”
* He did acknowledge a rumor I’d heard about delays in delivery of Northstar’s new 6100i series, but says they will be here this month (May), and that the 8000i will be delivered on schedule in June. The 6100i, incidently, is a juiced up version of the 6000i with support of Navionics Platinum charts and the new radar scanners which also work with the 8000i, and will eventually work (October) with the Navman 8120. The delay, he said, was logistical as manufacturing moved from Acton, Massachusetts to Auckland, New Zealand, which also resulted in price reductions. (There’s a sad aspect to that move, too, which I noted in my March column about BNTME, Ritblatt, and the 8000i—a column I just happily discovered is posted as a PDF at Northstar’s site).
* Ritblatt also noted that BNTME has a 100 engineers working on marine electronics products and what he thinks is the highest rate (% sales) of R&D investment in the industry. Finally, he gave me an impressive but off-the-record preview of products under development. There was an aphorism involved, but I’ve been asked not to repeat that either! Overall I’d say that while Ritblatt’s enthusiasm is no doubt part of his job description, his confidence in the future is pretty darn convincing.
Today I did talk with David Ritblatt, president of Brunswick New Technologies Marine Electronics (BNTME). While he delivered no scoops about the future corporate home of Northstar/Navman/MX Marine, he was quite persuasive about how healthy his division is…and he was funny. But the details of all that will have to wait until Monday. Today I’ll just kid him a bit about his just published interview in Marine Electronics Journal (the NMEA trade publication pictured above). You see his predictions about the future of marine electronics might seem almost as faulty as mine in light of Brunswick’s decision to sell its marine electronics assets. For instance, right at the beginning of the interview he says, “We [Brunswick] are integrating engines—Cummins-MercCruiser—so the next step obviously is to integrate electronics…We work with them [Brunswick boat builders] to integrate our electronics better in the dashboard.” Then later, talking about the concerns of electronics dealers, “They see what Brunswick is doing. They see Raymarine is hooking up with Volvo or Yamaha. They see Simrad is buying Lowrance. I call it ‘polarization’. Camps are starting to be formed.” That’s sort of what I was thinking too, at least until last week. In fact, Ritblatt stands by his predictions and still thinks that his electronics will be closely integrated into Brunswick boats (and other builders too). More on Monday, including the humor.
Well, I’ll be damned! The very unexpected news is that Brunswick now plans to sell much of Brunswick New Technologies, specifically the marine electronics bundle of Northstar, Navman and MX Marine plus Navman’s non-marine operations. This plan seemingly torpedos my notion that electronics, engine, and boat builders must follow the Brunswick lead and become closely intertwined as all their products become more integrated. What don’t I understand about this picture?
Later today: Of course I’ve called a few folks in the industry; in this little world, Brunswick’s announcement is a big deal, and, it turns out, anticipated by no one I know. You’d think that Raymarine and Maptech might be celebrating; I believe they’ve both been living in fear of losing substantial business if and when Brunswick boatbuilders standardised their helms on Brunswick electronics. But there are way too many uncertainties to this deal. For starters, it’s odd that Brunswick has only announced a desire to sell Navman/Northstar, not the buyer. Some players are fearful that that buyer will be Garmin, others that it will be Raymarine. Or maybe it’s a red herring, and only Navman’s non-marine business will actually get sold (which makes plenty of sense).
As for me, it’s too bad that my recent PMY electronics columns aren’t online (it’s a manpower issue, and I’m told they’ll all go up eventually), because then I could illustrate my embarrassing bafflement with a couple of links. The main one would be my March column about the Northstar 8000i, where I described how it’s taken a few years for Brunswick to digest Northstar and Navman, how these names—now really two brands used by the same global team of developer/manufacturers—have to compete for business within Brunswick as well as without, and, finally, how the 8000i looks like the system that might realize former (good point, Russ, below) Brunswick CEO George Buckley’s vision of a totally integrated boat, and thus win BNT a big chunk of Brunswick business. I’d also have to link you to the current May issue of PMY, where I take a look at Lowrance and wonder if its acquisition by Altor, along with Simrad and a boatbuilder closely associated with Volvo, might be the beginning of a Nordic version of Brunswick. Oy, I even finished with some noodling about “how Brunswick’s electronics and engine divisions are coming together in a seamless, possibly impenetrable, fashion…” May I hereby add: Or not!
Zeus (4), IPS joystick, and what does it all mean?
Apr 19, 2006
Volvo also introduced an omni-directional no-thruster-needed joystick at the Miami Boat Show. It has a computerised control module running a pair of independently turning IPS drives, like Zeus, but doesn’t have Zeus’s nervous system. That’s me trying it above, and while it just can’t have the precision of Zeus without the feedback, it too is a big advance in easy boat handling (plus it’s available right now). So, looking forward, we see two major marine engine manufacturers with new drive systems that offer significantly easier handling (and some other features) and are very electronic.
If I was an independent electronics manufacturer I’d be nervous. The Brunswick team—Mercury, Cummins, Northstar, and Navman—are already a little ahead in terms of the relatively simple business of putting engine data onto a CANbus (SmartCraft) so it’s available at all displays. I know companies like Lowrance and Raymarine are trying to get this sort of engine relationship using NMEA 2000, and there’s been progress, but once systems get as complicated as Zeus I doubt that multiple manufacturers will be involved. In fact, a Zeus engineer pretty much told me that it would be impossible to develop something like station holding unless it was all in-house (and note, you Ethernet freaks, that it’s all done with CANbus). Thus I found it interesting that Altor, the Swedish equity fund that’s taken over both Simrad and Lowrance, also just purchased a large Swedish boatbuilder with close ties to Volvo Penta. “Is this the beginning of a Nordic-centered Brunswick,” is the question I asked in my latest PMY column (mostly about Lowrance, and hopefully online soon). Will other engine and electronics companies merge or make alliances? Will all this push the independent players to greater support of NMEA 2000? Time will tell.
So what do I mean that the new Zeus propulsion system has nerves as well as brains? Well, hooked into the drive controller is an ultra high precision GPS and inertial navigation sensor which feeds it fast updates on the boat’s location along with which way she’s heading, sliding, twisting, rolling etc. Thus the drive gets instant feedback about how well it’s doing what you asked it to do. In other words, if you’re coming alongside a dock and you push the joystick a little bit to starboard, Zeus will take you a little bit to starboard no matter if the current or wind are pushing you hard toward the dock, away from it, or in some other direction. Zeus can do what the very best boat driver does, i.e. observe what the yacht is actually doing in real time, figure out all the forces involved, and compensate for them to get her to go where he wants her to go. Of course the ultimate expression of a totally integrated drive/navigation system like this is its ability to hold station, which seemed rock solid during the demo. It works so well, in fact, that the Cummins guys say they have put Ingenuity next to dock and stepped ashore—no dock lines (though that will never be an advertised feature). That well!
Now it must be noted that the specific navigation sensor hardware being used on the demo is apparently a very expensive Oxford Technologies RT3000 working with private Omnistar differential GPS corrections, which adds a serious subscription expense. But it’s clear that Brunswick’s electronics division is hard at work trying to provide the needed level of precision by the time Zeus becomes a real shipping system. In fact, Zeus may explain why Brunswick picked up MX Marine, which I couldn’t figure out last Spring. The image above shows a Navman/Northstar auto pilot that’s been souped up to work with Zeus’s amazing capabilities (note how the pilot is neatly showing you what the drives are up to as you cast a line, or take a picture, or whatever). It seems obvious that many Zeus boats will be Brunswick hulls with Brunswick drives and Brunswick electronics—all one—which is worth one more Zeus entry, tomorrow.
Above is the Zeus demo boat, which has just departed a slip at Miami’s Sealine Marina and now—instead of the normal hard right, hard left exit—is going dead sideways down the channel. Leaving those bow lines neatly on the pilings was also impressively easy—no stretching—because the driver could bump the bow where he wanted it with just a little twist and push on the joystick. Now omni-directional joystick control, typically using twin engines and a bow thruster, has been around for a while, but Zeus is more powerful and much more precise, and eliminating the thruster eliminates the weakest link. Whereas close-quarters maneuvering is about the hardest thing to learn about boating these days, this is a revolutionary development. So how the hell does it work?
Well, surprise, there is a micro processor involved! Zeus’s control module can steer, shift, and throttle each drive independently…drives which can turn 45 degrees outward and 15 inward, and can do so at a screaming 45 degrees per second. Hence the driver’s simple command to go sideways, or any which ways, results in some complex vector analysis and propulsion commands that only a human trained like a helicopter pilot could pull off (illustrated below). So Zeus is way beyond drive-by-wire technology; it has brains. In fact, it has a nervous system too, which I’ll explain tomorrow.
I still can’t load NOAA’s extra hi res aerial images of Katrina into Google Earth, but did succeed with some hi res black and white imagery from Image America. Above is a small section of the marina, lower middle in the images below. There are also thousands of helicopter photos collected by G.E. users who create and share geopositioned links to them. My excuse for writing about Google Earth on Panbo is that it seems evident that eventually we navigators will have access to something even higher resolution and fresher right from our cockpits...hopefully for viewing more cheerful images, like which slips are free in a rebuilt New Orleans marina. Unfortunately Katrina may be a harbinger of another future. At the risk of spending an even more somber Sunday, check out this essay by the brilliant environmental writer Bill McKibben.
I was a bit taken aback when the wonderful Keyhole was rebranded as Google Earth; it sounds so pretentious. But, geez, it just keeps getting better. Now there’s a free version of G.E., plus they’ve just posted hi res sat photos of New Orleans after Katrina and made it easy to compare them with “before”. These particular images actually came from Google Maps, which is easy to access with a Web browser, but they are also available in G.E., along with super high res daily overlays from NOAA (though I haven’t been able to make the link work yet).
This a marina on Lake Pontchartrain that obviously got walloped by Katrina, despite pretty good protection. That’s a big pile of boats lower right, quite visible zoomed in (I’m hoping no one was there trying to save their ship). I think this marina is where I once began a wild ride on a power yacht aptly named “Bontemps Roulez”. That was way back in 1972, while spending a winter in N.O. working on oil field boats and falling in love with the Music City. Unfortunately I’ve never been back, and now the good times have clearly stopped rolling, at least for a while.
The race to get hard drives into cell phones and PDAs may result in drives that really lend themselves to tough marine environments. Hitachi just announced a 1”, 8 gigabyte drive with ESP (“Extra Sensory Protection”). It uses a 3-axis accelerometer to detect a fall in as short as four inches and switch into non-operational mode, which according to Hitachi can handle 2000 Gs of shock. It’s hard to imagine where such tiny, rugged drives will take us… or to fathom what it means about the future when tech companies name a hard drive "Mikey" and promote it as “the new bling!” Is it politically incorrect to laugh, imagining a roomful of Asian marketing execs discussing “bling”?
Update 9/7: How timely; today Apple announced a new iPod “nano” that obviously uses a drive like "Mikey". Walt Mossberg, the gadget guy at The Wall Street Journal, is in love with it.
This babe, the first of Inmarsat’s 4th generation satellite fleet, was launched in March and recently went into service over the Indian Ocean. That dish antenna is 9 meters across, the array of solar panels extend 45 meters. The flap at far left is a “sail”, able to “harness pressure exerted by particles from the Sun - the solar wind - to steer the I-4 and fine-tune its orbital position”. This bird is already improving existing Inmarsat service in its planet print, and is just about to really show its stuff in terms of high speed data. Tim Queeney at Ocean Navigator nicely lays out what this all means for actual boat communications here (not much yet, unless your ride is a megayacht).
Never mind that Yme covered this Friday’s (mega) gizmo early last year. LookSea is truly unique, little known, and, besides, it was developed right here in the great state of Maine. What you’re seeing—larger image here—are a fenced route and buoy icons precisely superimposed on the video flowing from a pan and tilt, high resolution, wide angle camera mounted on the cabin top. ARPA and AIS targets, charted obstructions, and whatever else you need (and only what you need) can also be geopositioned on the live video. This is damn tricky to pull off accurately, and if it wasn’t done really fast, it would literally make you sick. I saw it demoed in a bouncy little boat on a snotty night, and can tell you that it works beautifully (fat .pdf of my article available here). I second the claim that LookSea is the “only augmented reality marine navigational system available and represents a quantum leap in safety and situational awareness.” It’s darn expensive, but I figure it’s a harbinger of things to come. (LookSea now a good step-by-step demo and other materials here).
I’m on the road to Annapolis where I’ll get to trial Maptech’s wild new fishfinder module for its i3 system, maybe catch a croaker too. The poor photo above is of a simulation playing at the Miami Boat Show introduction. You can see on the left a regular 2D fishfinder screen while on the right the fish targets have been placed into a 3D bathy model; among other things, you can control how long targets stay on screen so that you can learn where fish hang out over time. Then on Thursday I’m visiting Airmar, source of the transducer and processor behind this module, and much more. My posting may get a little raggedy.
If you go to the NMEA Web site and click on “NMEA 2000 Info”, the very first thing you’ll learn is how expensive it is to use the standard. These fees piss off small developers no end. (And isn’t it poor marketing on the part of NMEA? Why not have some good dope there about how the standard works and what it can do?) But the fees are there to finance the infrastructure needed to truly support a complex plug’n’play standard. For instance, I recently heard that updating the software certification tool that assures compatability will cost something like $200,000.
Meanwhile, I was out on Sunday checking out the benefits of that compatability again, and looking foolish. (Is there a geekier 14’ outboard afloat?) Now I have the laptop mounted, also sharing data fine, though currently the Maretron gateway translates 2000 into 0183 because no PC program reads NMEA 2000 directly. That’s going to change, and I’m told that eventually thousands of independent programmers will be using 2000 data to build boat applications we haven’t imagined yet.
I like this: GPS backed up—plus made more accurate, even able to deliver better than 1° heading accuracy at rest—with LORAN! And this is LORAN without the fiddly complexity of compensating for “Additional Secondary Factors” in coastal waters or switching ‘Chains’ on long voyages. Si-Tex’s eLoran is not quite shipping yet, but I’ll bet it will get loads of attention (Chuck Husick already has this to say). In fact, we’ve all gotten so dependent on GPS that it’s a little scary. I wrote about its vulnerability, and the possible resurgence of LORAN as a complimentary system back in 2002, and have since noted the government’s funding of LORAN base station improvements. It’s great to see belt & suspenders electronic positioning come to recreational boating, not to mention the non magnetic heading sensor capability. Actually, eLoran is one result of a military research contract executed by Si-Tex’s mother company, Koden. Note that this initial product will only work with certain Si-Tex plotters and PC software at first, but other manufacturers will be free to add compatability. I’ve also been told that eLoran will cost about $1,000, and I plan to try one out when available.
Eli, proprietor of the often stimulating EliBoat, knows Maine waters and yesterday wondered “if the new charting programs will ever find a way to plot 6 trillion lobster pots.” His number is only a slight exaggeration; the pot buoys and their warps really are a navigation problem. Eli jests but I do hear talk of AIS transponders replacing RACON buoys at harbor entrances and maybe someday the tiny RFID radios supposedly coming to everything in Walmart will warn a boater of a dead on buoy about to tangle his prop. But in the meantime a sharp blade can do what electronics can’t. I tried this Hook Knife from Sailors Solutions last summer and it is wickedly effective.
It’s hard to reconcile the somewhat goofy bridge scene above with the wicked looking warship below, but they represent the same yet unbuilt U.S. Navy design called a Littoral Combat Ship (LCS). Picture an aluminum and steel 127m (417’) trimaran capable of sustained “sprints” at 47 knots and tight manuevering—even in shoal water—with waterjets and steerable thrusters. While flying last week I met an enthusiastic General Dynamics engineer who gave me the Web address of this fascinating project. Of particular note to electronics geeks is the design’s “flexible information technology backbone that allows ‘plug and play’ integration.” Apparently the Navy has imposed “open architecture” requirements and GD’s solution “leverages industry standards and non-proprietary interfaces.” I guess that explains all the Dell monitors on the mockup bridge, and I wonder if they are using NMEA 2000? And wouldn’t the LCS design make a hell of a megayacht, though Larry Ellison—no relation—would have to settle for something shorter than his current ride. (More pictures here).
When Navionics Platinum chart cards come out this summer, 3D photo mapping will come to boat plotters. Platinum (still not much on the Web yet) is really going to turn some heads, as it did during the Miami Boat Show. If you want to see what the eventual possibilities are, take a look at NASA’s free program World Wind. It’s not quite as user friendly as Keyhole, but has higher resolution photography for much of the U.S. The screen shot above (bigger here) shows a Hilton in Clearwater Beach, Florida, where I’m attending a magazine meeting this week. In World Wind I was able to check out the beach and marinas, etc. before I got here. You’ll understand why posting may be irregular this week!
“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.
At this point in the year I like to cruise around the various “Best of” tech lists, mostly for geeky fun, but also looking for innovations that may eventually trickle down to the boating world. Like Popsci.com’s 
I like this: GPS backed up—plus made more accurate, even able to deliver better than 1° heading accuracy at rest—with LORAN! And this is LORAN without the fiddly complexity of compensating for “Additional Secondary Factors” in coastal waters or switching ‘Chains’ on long voyages. Si-Tex’s 
Eli, proprietor of the often stimulating 
When Navionics Platinum chart cards come out this summer, 3D photo mapping will come to boat plotters. Platinum (still not much on the Web yet) is really going to turn some heads, as it did during the Miami Boat Show. If you want to see what the eventual possibilities are, take a look at NASA’s free program 
“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.”