Raymarine LifeTag, Part 2
As noted yesterday, the LifeTag man overboard system really shines when interfaced via SeaTalk to an appropriate plotter, like the E-Series shown above. The data here is being generated by NemaTalker down in the Panbo Test Facility (aka my basement shop), but the E doesn’t know it. It thinks we’re tootling along near Schoodic Point until I walk the LifeTag more than about 30’ away from the base station, or plunge it into a bucket of water. After a 10 second delay, the buzzers go off and the E goes into MOB mode, establishing a new GoTo and zooming in as far as it can to include both boat and man-in-a-bucket. Again the install was simple, three SeaTalk wires for power and data, no set up. And the manuals are good.
Now, as noted in part one’s comments, LifeTag won’t help you home in on the victim, and frankly I was surprised by the figure Russ dug up of 95% success if a GPS MOB point is established. The mermaid id he referenced sounds interesting, and I know there are other intriguing products. But I don’t think any work so well on an integrated system basis…if you have compatible Raymarine gear (well, excepting NKE). It would be nice if there were effective NMEA 0183 and 2000 MOB messages and LifeTag used them. Do note, though, that Ray’s system does have a 12v output for triggering “appropriate emergency systems”, though I’m not sure what they are (anyone?).
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I hope Raymarine and others come up with an easy way of rejoining the previous GPS route after a MOB event is cancelled. My Navman chartplotter requires me to re-initialize the route I was on and manually skip, one by one, every waypoint prior to my current location. Try doing this in rough seas.