When Ask Jack Rabbit recently got the goods on Raymarine’s new 12– and 15–inch G-Series monitors, brochures and manuals included, he hinted that perhaps other models or a coming black box would add “storage and processing capacity.” Apparently so, as here’s the “launch” description from the Southampton Boat Show:
If a 14.5” stabilized dish can look, and work, fine on my 25’ Ralph, most anyone who wants satellite TV on board can have it. But there are a lot more choices since I tested KVH’s great little TracVision M3 in 2006. In the August PMY, I detailed SeaTel’s Coastal 14 and King Control’s Sea-King 9815–RJ, and how KVH had met this competition by rejiggering the original M3 into the M3st, M3dx, and M2 models. The battle was rejoined last weekend when King introduced the Sea-King 1500-HD.
Head’s up, open source programmers. Marcello Ferrero has begun the Amerigo project, navigation freeware meant for PC, PocketPC and WinMobile phones and PDAs. A “PreAlpha” release is out, and Ferrero is hoping some nautical code jockies will join him. One feature that he thinks unique will be the ability to use a Smart Phone with camera to create a photo POI in one click, adding categories and text as desired. But I wouldn’t be surprised to see this sort of feature arrive first from ActiveCaptain’s mobile project, still “under construction”, or maybe EarthNC, or who knows where. Does anyone doubt that Web 2.0 will mash up tight with marine navigation eventually?
Maretron is a little shy about its N2K Analyzer software tool—it’s still in “beta” and there’s still no help file—but I think it’s nifty. If you have an interest in NMEA 2000, take a look at the screen shot full size. It shows the N2K test system in the lab connected via Maretron’s USB100 gateway to my laptop. The software lets me see details of each device in the network, including which PGNs it’s sending. PGN, by the way, stands for “Parameter Group Numbers” but is probably better understood as families of data fields.
That’s an Argonaut Tflex-G615 under that extra layer of protection, just like the one I tested, and it’s connected to a down-below Mac Mini that’s running MacENC. This is on an “unsinkable” ETAP 37 belonging to Bob Etter, who’s a principal at ETAP Charter Lease and apparently a devoted Mac navigator. This shot was taken when he first tried the setup—“It could be brighter…For less that a grand, it is fantastic!”—and I hope to hear soon how well it worked this summer. I do know that he’s added a NSi waterproof touchpad, which looks like a neat piece a gear. 
It’s made of stainless steel, “vandalproof” too. Apparently it uses “Field Distortion Technology” which means it is not pressure sensitive—“a light touch is sufficient, tracking your fingertip precisely.” But because of “the capacitive working principle, the unit might not work with thicker gloves.” On the other hand (there I go again), “it will operate at all mounting angles and it does not require cleaning or maintenance.” There’s a lot to learn about touch technology. By the way, NSi also makes a trackball with software controlled back-lighting, called the Chameleon, which may well be the source of the neat Palladium visual alarming trackball I spotted at the Ft. Lauderdale show last year.
That’s a Panasonic Toughbook MDWD I tested for PMY back in early 2003, and mentioned here when Nobeltec began selling it as a navigation accessory. It came with a simple plastic stylus—nice for, say, setting a waypoint bang on a buoy—but it could also be fingered. Check the larger shot and see how easy it was to tap common underway controls like zooming using those big buttons in Capn Voyager (or in Nobeltec Admiral’s NavView). Well, I’m a bit shocked to discover that the current model of Panasonic’s wireless display seems to use an active digitizer stylus, and will not respond to a finger.
The product image may be a little fruity—HP calls it the “perfect kitchen computer”—but I think this TouchSmart IQ770 might make one heck of a boat computer. That’s a 19” “BrightView” 1,440 x 900 pixel touchscreen display that responds to finger or stylus. I’ve tried navigating on tablet computers and think that while a stylus is fine for planning it’s not so great for underway work, especially if you get your hands on (sorry!) a navigation program truly designed for finger commands.
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.
Type my zip code into the Sprint coverage map and you’ll get the above. The green color indicates some level of service, but the little dots mean “Signal strength information unavailable.” Well, when I queried AnyTrack last week, a tech there told me that “usually, in areas with this sort of coverage there is very spotty Sprint cellular coverage.” I’ll say!
As suggested yesterday, boaters who already have Globalstar phones—or are trying to decide between its lower rates and faster data versus Iridium’s greater reliability and range—want to know when Globalstar will fix the amplifier problems that have plagued duplex service over the last year or so. One bit of news is that Globalstar is now offering an online Optimum Availability Report. I can’t report first hand on its accuracy, but a bigger look at the screen above suggests that, at least around Bermuda, the non-optimal times are somewhat lengthy and thus this list might be really helpful. (A Panbo reader who is struggling with a new 1700 in the Bahamas, and who we’ll hear more from, calls it the “Gap Report” and notes that it’s frustratingly difficult to access with his…satellite phone!) But what about those four new satellites that went up in May? Globalstar recently told me this:
