I sometimes wonder how the smaller marine electronics manufacturers will get along as more and more boaters seem to go with systems centered on do-it-all MFDs from the Big Four brands. So it's good to read on the Si-Tex home page that the company turned a profit in its first year under new management. The trick seems to be filling niches that the big boys have largely abandoned, like the new standalone SDD-110 Digital Depth Gauge above, which will drop right into the hole left by a venerable Datamarine Offshore Sounder and only retails for $349, excluding an 'inexpensive' transducer...
Despite a fair bit of reporting on MIBS 2011 (Google search here), I failed to discuss what I saw during the back-to-back demonstrations of chirp fishfinding just before the show. In a word, it WORKS! All the writers -- many of whom do a lot more fishing than I do -- seemed to agree that they'd never before seen the target resolution imaged by both the Garmin GSD 26 and the Simrad BSM-2. And in some cases -- like the fishy wreck near the Miami Harbor entrance above -- we got to see both implementations of chirp in almost identical situations...
So now a CHIRP war is breaking out. This morning Garmin announced two new black box fishfinders: The GSD 24 appears to be a $700 redesign of its previous top-of-the-line digital box while the $2,000 GSD 26 is an obvious play for the truly serious fishing crowd. The GSD 26 features "Spread Spectrum" technology, which seems to be another name for the CHIRP support that Simrad announced as part of its new BSM-2 box in September. In fact, both Garmin and Simrad will be running demos of their advanced fishfinding over the next couple of days off Miami, and I'll be taking a ride with each...
The press release characterizes the new (little 'e') echo series fishfinders -- six models in all, with the $450 550c above at the high end, and an $80 echo 100 at the low -- as "Garmin's return to the freshwater market." Which I read as "Hello, Lowrance and Humminbird!" and also as another sign of the company's tenacity. Dropping out of the hyper intense smart phone market may have been wise, but Garmin usually seems to meet competitive adversity with new models, improved features, better value, etc. They may have lost focus on the inland market for a bit, but they're back, and consider too the new xHD 4kW open array radars...
EchoPilot's 3D forward looking sonar, mentioned here last year when Kees covered METS, purportedly just started shipping, and the screen shots posted at the company site are even more compelling. That spire imaged above, for instance, represents a navigation buoy with a triple mooring system. But might this product be causing the judges of this year's DAME (Design at METS) Award some anguish? They did choose it as one of the six finalists in the Marine Electronics category, but it's got to be difficult to judge such a unique technology on the basis of screen shots, especially when they can get more hand's with some of the other other nominees...
Rats! I thought I'd recount some of the summer's Simrad StructureScan experience since I mentioned it in Monday's entry about chart problems, and while I was pleased to find a screenshot taken right in the Thorofare discussed...I failed to snap one after passing over the disputed danger. But you can see how flat and smooth the bottom is just short of what is supposed to an "awash (at low tide) rock"; please trust that the bottom stayed just like that as I drove right over the annoyance, as I posted on AC. But maybe you can't intrepret the screen above well until you see more of what this side looking technology can do...
Last week Lowrance announced the Elite-5 DSI and some related fishfinder/plotters, and while they're unabashedly aimed at freshwater fishermen, there's at least two things of interest to others. DSI stands for DownScan Imaging, which seems to mean that Lowrance has isolated the high resolution down-looking portion of StructureScan into an even more inexpensive form. That means a transducer that can ping at 455 or 800 kHz, trading detail for depth and breadth. Aren't lots of non-fishing boaters -- like gunkholers and/or curious monkeys like me -- also interested in detailed bottom imagery, even if it's only to 100 feet or so? That's why I installed StructureScan on Gizmo even though the thru-hull transducer wasn't ready yet, and I can't wait to seriously experiment with it (soon!). The new Lowrance plotters will also be the first I know of to exclusively use MicroSD chart cards...
Phase two of the Garmin extravaganza -- a fishing trip off Texas with pro angler Bill Platt -- may not have gone quite as planned, but I don't think you need much more than this image of calm seas, blue sky, and a huge ass red snapper to know that it was truly a blast...
That's a beautifully built Interphase forward looking sonar (FLS) transducer -- actually two phased array transducers, one 90° vertical and one 90° horizontal, cast into the same epoxy block (hence the dual outputs). It can be used with several Interphase FLS models, but I'm looking forward to trying it with the company's new Ultrascan PC90, discussed here last Fall. And I went to some trouble, including carefully band sawing that fairing block, to give it a good view. In fact, some may call me crazy...
