I first saw a working FLIR M-626L thermal camera in Miami last winter, and am keen to try it on my own boat in familiar territory. Obviously the shot above was taken from my mooring float before the daylight faded completely, but it does hint strongly at what I'll get at night. After all, the image seen on the Raymarine C140W above is all about heat, not light. Click on the photo and compare thermal to visible spectrum. (Note that I added the black marks at top to show the slightly-panned camera's field of view, and that everything is slightly widened because I used the Ray's widescreen aspect ratio to fill the screen.) See how 'hot' humans on the docks and even in the distant head-of-harbor park show up clearly, as does the south-facing brick wall of the library and the similarly heat-holding ledges up on Mt. Battie? When I get a chance to try the FLIR in pitch dark conditions, I hope to see lobster pot buoys -- the bane of night running around here -- pop out clearly. In the meantime, here are a couple of neat M-Series installation details...
When I first met Alltek Marine Electronics Corp. in late 2007, the team was working on a LifeTag-like MOB system (speaking of Raymarine). Well, now the AMEC MOB Dolphin is apparently ready to go, including FCC approval. The idea of plotting MOBs on an AMEC Camino 201 Class B AIS transponder seems to have gone by the wayside, but a single-hander can set up the system so that his/her connected AMEC AIS will send out an SRM message if the worst happens. I'm not sure how well that will work as Safety Related Messages seem to be a little used part of the AIS system. But the MOB Dolphin does come with an interesting-looking PC program for monitoring and managing the up-to-99 pendants it can handle...
I first got excited about RTEs (Radar Target Enhancers) in 2002 when the Sea-Me came out; in fact, it inspired one of my favorite PMY columns (in which you'll also learn why I want a whomping big horn on Gizmo). The Sea-Me went on to be quite a successful product, at least in the U.K., but now Echomax -- the Brits who already build a respected line of static radar reflectors -- has come out with its own Active-X RTE, and apparently it just plain kicks Sea-Me's butt...
If the remarkably small and inexpensive GPS-equipped Fast Find PLB also works very well, what does that mean? My guess is that it makes McMurdo king of the PLB hill, at least for a while, and that it will give pause to folks who are considering the Spot messenger at least in part as a safety device. And who's the guy we might trust most to judge Fast Find performance? That would be Doug Ritter, majordomo of Equipped.org, who has a long record of thoroughly testing safety devices. In fact, it was Ritter, and a large team he assembled, who painstakingly quantified GPS problems with an earlier McMurdo PLB in a test program that ultimately forced the company to recall and update the units...
This graph is a thermal sensor manufacturer's dream -- and was, in fact, created by the marketing department at FLIR -- but, hey, that's us way over to the right. I'd love to see the price of thermal cameras go so low, and unit volume so high, that "most cars/boats/ships" have them. Like GPS, once you understand how well the technology works, you want to have it aboard. I remember well the Magellan Nav 1000 (below), which seemed totally magic 20 years ago, but was actually quite crude and cost over $1,000...
When I wrote about SafeLife in January, I didn't realize that this full-on through-satellite EPIRB and PLB testing service wasn't quite ready to go. In fact, it's not trivial to put together the system of ground stations, software, and Web site able to actually capture the test signals many EPIRBs and PLBs can send out, reference them to the owner registration details, and report it all back to you. But the good news is that SafeLife is now looking for 100 beta testers, and they want a lot more volunteers so they can select a good cross section of brands and locations around the continental USA. And if qualify but don't get chosen, you'll still get a 30% discount on the service once it actually opens for business, if you're still interested. What's to lose, besides a little time registering? One caveat: the hot new FastFind PLBs, now FCC approved, can not be used for through-satellite testing (because their coiled antennas have to be repacked at a service center, I think). Doug Ritter, per usual, has the whole story.
No, the new FLIR M-Series and its controller are not the same size, but here's my attempted graphic point: That sexy dual-payload pan and tilt camera casing -- at only eleven inches tall -- is smaller than your eye might presume. While that's still taller than the competitors' search light casings, the M-Series can pan +/-90 degrees, has a horizontal swept volume equal only to its seven inch maximum diameter, and it purportedly still fits under most open array radar scanners. FLIR spent a lot of time developing this casing for the mid-size yacht market, and intends it as a platform for future developments, but the big news in Miami was that the initial M-626L model sports a 640 x 480 pixel thermal imager. Now that sounds pretty low res by current video camera standards, but in the thermal world it's such a big deal that the government puts certain limitations on its use...
Marine WatchMate is a boat security system that can include up to four cameras which can be monitored on board, on a computer ashore (via the Internet), or even on certain cell phones. The cameras can be IP based, or regular analog pushed through an A/D converter. The one I saw demoed in Miami, above, was analog and it worked fine, but apparently the IP cameras can even be panned and zoomed from your cell or PC. What a world...
A major press event in Miami was FLIR’s on water demo of its neat new mid-priced M-Series dual camera system, which I’ll cover soon. But first I’ll discuss the recent efforts of two FLIR competitors to make enhanced vision more “affordable”. Above is VEI’s OceanView Apollo II, which features a 320 x 240 pixel thermal camera and a 570 line “ultra low light” cam (0.00015 Lux!). The zoom is only 2x digital, but it tilts (internally) 26 degrees, pans 360 continuous, and comes with a controller that has a 4 line LCD to help with initial aiming and set up menus. It retails for $12,995, which is pretty darn reasonable for thermal vision, but…
