I’ve actually been testing Lowrance’s XOG for months now, and have become quite a fan. Primarily it’s a touch screen car navigator with voice directions and two gigs worth of Navteq street maps (U.S. and Canada) and three plus million POI’s built-in. But it’s also splash proof and can display all sorts of Lowrance and Navionics cartography on preprogrammed SD cards, or downloaded to your own card from www.map-select.com. What you’re seeing above, and bigger here, is an older Navionics Silver card.
I didn’t plan to go off line on the occasion of Panbo’s third birthday, but, man, am I! I’m posting this entry using the free WiFi at the Great Machipongo Clam Shack (excellent), and a couple of my fingers aren’t typing at 100% due to a header I took off a bicycle yesterday. Where I’m staying there’s no Internet or cell coverage, and besides I’m tempted just to settle into a deck chair and watch the egrets, plovers, geese, etc. all day. In short, though I brought lots of entry material along, Panbo may be very sporadic this week.
I guess this sort of thing was inevitable, thanks to FCC recalcitrance, but still it’s a sad sale for all but a few. Apparently PortVision, an interesting U.S.-based commercial marine information service, has concluded that the FCC is not about to allow Class B AIS anytime soon, and is liquidating its inventory of SRT transponders (update: sorry, all gone). You may recall that SRT Marine Technology—which once did business as Software Radio—developed the core technology that’s in every Class B transponder currently approved by the U.S. Coast Guard and other certification authorities.
We interrupt Panbo’s regular NMEA 2000 programming for some video side experiments. Seen above is what you get if you plug a DVD player into a Garmin 5212’s RCA “video in” port. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a multifunction display that could show video completely full screen (correction: with the exception of Standard Horizon, which can purportedly go to every edge when fed the right aspect ratio). But neither have I seen one that used quite as little of the available screen as this Garmin is doing; on the other hand, the 5212's’s video image is really sharp and rich, there are lots of controls (as shown), and if you put it into a quarter screen window it does fill its whole width.
While the extreme N2K cable mixing and daisy chaining shown yesterday did seem to work OK in lab conditions, here’s a smarter approach for a serious boat system (bigger here). The main change is that every cable section possible is NMEA “approved,” which means it’s built to the ODVA DeviceNet standard (that NMEA borrowed). While every N2K cable and connector seems vastly superior to the fine-gauge 0183 wires, crimp connectors, terminal blocks etc. they replace, DeviceNet seems the best of the lot—particularly in terms of interference protection—and I don’t see that it’s significantly more expensive or harder to work with (especially given the growing number of install doodads, even breakout boxes).
The Panbo lab is a good place to push things in ways a smart installer never would; in other words, do not try this—bigger picture—on your boat! What I did here was to purposely break about every NMEA 2000 “recommendation” I could.
Check out the sensor array outside the lab. That’s not today—though it’s snowing just north of me now, raining cold and mean here—but it was taken recently, and the gear was similarly abused often during this most memorable Maine winter. Tactick, Maretron, Airmar, and ACR all get credit for standing up to harsh elements, even working OK in conditions like this. And note the exposed NMEA 2000 tees, terminator, and drop cables—they did fine too, and I’ll have much more on N2K in the weeks to come. But the real subject today is that MaineBoats.com sticker proudly shown on my truck.
There’s been a slight change in the GPS satellite system and it’s messing up some older Northstar sets—i.e. certain 941, 951, 952, 961, and 962 Navigators, depending on their software version. Northstar has a tech bulletin online, along with a more detailed PDF.
Well, I’ll be darned. Raymarine’s stock jumped today, the company stated that “it has received a preliminary approach which may or may not lead to an offer being made for the company,’ and analysts can’t seem to figure out who the bidder might be. IBI suggests that Simrad, Garmin, and Furuno are all possibilities, but I’m hard put to see how any of those combinations makes much sense. The gossip line is open!
Today Faria announced that it had acquired “certain marine-related software products from Maptech”, as well as several former engineers. Of course that must mean the Touch Screen Navigator program that Faria is putting into its Maestro System.
