Sandrine 2, FLIR Voyager (outmoded!)
Binoculars, sminoculars! Open the bigger image to get a hint of how well Sandrine’s FLIR Voyager multi-camera system is bringing in the little tower on Mt. Battie (from which I took Panbo’s header photo). Live in person you could easily watch the tourists climbing around, and we didn’t have it totally zoomed in. But, egads, on Oct. 1 FLIR will offer a Voyager II model with some must-have features. For one thing, it will input radar cursor data and thus automatically hone in on selected targets, which could be very valuable, I think. It will also have an IP address, and thus will be remote controllable from any computer on the yacht or beyond, which could be fun.
Note, though, that there are camera tracking tricks that Voyager still won’t do, and that I kid about “outmoded.” It doesn’t say in the press release, but this sounds like an upgrade that can be retrofit to original Voyagers easily. Besides, sometimes outmoded is the way to go. Sandrine, for instance, has not yet upgraded from Nobeltec Admiral 9.0 to Max Pro, even though it’s free (that’s Admiral on the middle screen above with N2KView, as discussed yesterday, to the right). I suspect they’re cautiously awaiting the first service pack, which actually just appeared (and has encouraged me to spend more time with Max, which you’ll hear about next week). Finally, has any eagle eye noticed that the tower is right of the head-sail in reality but left of it on the FLIR screen? That’s because the camera up in the antenna farm has a slightly different point of view.
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Maybe I'm missing the point, but that level of zoom would be unusable at sea.