AIS is great, but it’s just a tool to help a skipper mind the rules of the road, including the “tonnage rule” being violated above in San Francisco Bay last week. I came across the “Starboard!” story at Yachting Monthly, Peter Lyons’s photo sequence is here, YachtPals has more info on the collision, and this Kiwi site claims that the mighty Maltese Falcon has had to issue the 5 blast danger signal “on far too many occasions” around SF. Oh, and my Sail mate Kimball Livingston was aboard.
How behind is Panbo? Well, in July I whined about Garmin’s introduction of the touchscreen Oregon handheld before I’d yet written much about the somewhat similar Colorado. While I’ve been testing an Oregon for some weeks (and still haven’t posted here about it), Garmin has introduced two new handheld/portable units of considerable interest to boaters. One is the nüvi 500 above, a waterproof, multi-mode version of Garmin’s 3.5” touchscreen automobile navigator. Which makes it a direct, and probably awesome, competitor to the Lowrance XOG and Magellan Crossover. Fortunately, the able blogsters at GPS Magazine and GPSTracklog have both reviewed the unit, though neither went boating with one. I don’t think anyone has yet seen the intriguing GPSMap 640…
What can’t be improved with electronics? Hence the battery going up the hind end of the Sevenstrand Electronic Acoustic Lure above. The idea is to attract billfish by simulating the sound (wailing?) of distressed bait fish. And I’m pretty darn sure it works because Greg Stotesbury told me so…
Check the stats! They indicate that at one moment earlier today one particular network of AIS coastal receivers was seeing 763 AIS Class A transponders from towers scattered around the U.S. And one Class B. Guess whose 5 meter pleasure (and electronics testing) vessel that was?
How about a 5" square "multi-band bisynchronous simultaneous reception and transmission " antenna that doesn't need to be mast-mounted and can handle frequencies from AM and shortwave through FM and VHF and up into cellular, GPS, sat phones, and WiFi...three radios at once?!? That's actually just the beginning of what AMT Revolution claims possible of its "Advanced Membrane Transducers."
It’s come to my attention that not every Panbo reader is obsessed with AIS! So how about a new charting app for the iPhone? That would be Navionics Mobile, which was just introduced at the Genoa Boat Show. It is, in fact, a relative of iNavX, the first iPhone charting app (why reinvent good code?), though obviously different. iNavX can’t download a NOAA raster chart of Genoa, Italy, for instance, and no raster chart can offer a choice of nav aid presentation as illustrated in the split screen shots above and below...
Wow, the Class B AIS story is moving fast. If I’m understanding the FCC Equipment Authorization database correctly (select “AIS” from the “Equipment Class” drop-down list), last Friday Navico added one last submission to its NAIS-300 application—the photo above—and the unit was certified that very day, along with the Simrad AI50. The photo, full size here, not only shows a new warning label that’s apparently acceptable to the FCC (remember, it has changed its mind before), but also a Class B transponder I’ve never seen before. So we have two new questions: can an American buy either of these Navico transponders today, and what the heck is a NAIS-300?
The one-day product exhibit at the NMEA Conference is never long enough for me, and I hope the manufacturers I missed—often the ones I know the best—took no offense (you know where to find me!). I put particular focus on companies appearing at NMEA for the first time, like Digital Yacht above. This U.K. firm has been operating in Europe for some time, and is larger and more diversified than even its extensive Web site indicates. For instance, principal Nick Heyes seen above, and bigger here, is also a principal at Marine Electronic Services LTD. At any rate, Digital Yacht is not only setting up a U.S. distribution and service branch, but also introducing an interesting new navigation system called Touch…
What with Class B AIS transponders finally coming to market, a new AIS receiver may seem irrelevant. But it’s from Icom, it seems to be designed and priced right, and I suspect that it will be a winner. The $500 MXA-5000 is a true dual channel receiver—especially important when Class B proliferates—with a built-in antenna splitter, dual outputs (plotter and PC), and the ability to mix GPS input into the AIS target stream. This sample unit had just arrived from Japan but the Icom rep here at the NMEA conference said that it seemed to be very sensitive in initial testing. While Class B transponders are also true dual channel receivers, they will cost significantly more, especially when a separate antenna is figured in. The MXA-5000 will be available in December, and maybe so will Class B…
Check out this recent entry in Maine Boats, Homes & Harbors great series of retro ads. It dimly reminded me of autopilots on the old fishing boats I spend time around in Gloucester, Mass., back in the late 70’s. Some were still using strange schemes to derive electrical signals from a tradition card-in-fluid compass, like a light shining through a hole in the edge of the card to a series of photo-electric cells arrayed in a circle beneath. The Photo-Electric Pilot didn’t make it to the Internet, but I did come across this amazing bit of related marine electronics history:
