All hail Richard Brain. While the Consumer Electronics Show, year-end “best new…” lists and patent searches may all offer 2009 marine electronics possibilities, the real deal—mainly a passel of very interesting Raymarine preview products—is being shown at the London Boat Show. And Richard was kind enough to collect brochures, photograph them, and email them to me for your Panbo pleasure. So let’s thank Richard and say hello to Ray’s new “Widescreen” C Series, which is truly different from the original…
Hot damn. The nine and ten inch screens on these new ASUS Eee PC T91 and T101 “netbooks” swivel to tablet mode and are not just touch but multi touch. The small one weighs just over two pounds, and can have a GPS built in. Now I’m quite aware that my interest in the big HP TouchSmart series isn’t shared by many boaters, but, geez, couldn’t one of these little puppies make a nifty nav/comms accessory? Engadget and particularly LaptopMag have good T91/T101 coverage. Pricing isn’t noted but the existing ASUS Eee series bodes well. Also at CES, Spot announced a roadside assist add-on service that might be great for trailer boaters. I’m sure there’s more of interest at the show, and will keep looking.
One enterprising, if anonymous, Panbot has apparently been searching out filings at the U.S. Patent Office, and discovered some interesting recent activity regarding Furuno Electric Co. and Forward Looking Sonar (FLS). You may recall that Furuno previewed the “FL-7000” at the NMEA Conference in 2005, but then scrapped the product, purportedly due to inconsistent performance. That entry and its comments demonstrate well my personal enthusiasm for improved FLS and the current state of the technology (valuable but limited, with ongoing incremental improvements). Well, patents are hard to read, and don’t necessarily mean much, but…
My coverage of the NMEA Conference last October was dominated by Class B AIS (and largely—doh!—a vessel naming issue that turned out to be immaterial). But in fact I also learned how AIS is getting into all sorts of marine systems, and was reminded of that by the recently published minutes of the Oct. 3 GMDSS Task Force meeting I attended. One item of note is the prototype AIS SART seen above, overlaid on a slide of the impressive test results such SARTs are generating. Most recreational boaters aren’t familiar with Search and Rescue Transponders, but they are standard gear on ship lifeboats, and heretofore used radar amplification—like a RACON—to help rescuers home in the last few miles. I’ve seen a live demo and wasn’t very impressed, and I’ve even heard buttoned-up GMDSS regulator types complain that it was not a very effective technology. Well, guess what? AIS SARTs work much, much better. The specifications aren’t yet wrapped up, but interestingly AIS SARTs will apparently broadcast just once a minute, but with eight message bursts to compensate for wave interference. Is there lots more AIS may do? You betcha…
Aside from Panbo’s able crew of regular commenters—some of whom I’ve gotten to know personally, and all of whom I appreciate—the sixty thousand plus unique monthly visitors here are a somewhat mysterious mishmash of marine electronics enthusiasts, product info searchers, and trades people. (Feel free to speak up your own self, and apologies in advance for the somewhat cranky comment system, which will be improved in 2009.) Actually I also personally know a lot of folks in the trade who read Panbo regularly, and have been told that several companies have a designated monitor tasked with passing along relevant entries and comments to management. How 2009/Web 2.0 cool is that? And it means that if you’d like to express your wishes for the marine electronics future, you will be heard. Russ Irwin, proprietor of the data mishmash above, gets the first word (and credit as instigator):
bodes well. Also at CES, Spot announced a 
