Temporarily mounted on Gizmo's scruffy masthead are two pretty neat LED flood lights. At right, facing aft, is a Lumitec Caprera, which purports to replace a 55 watt halogen while only using .9 amp and retailing for about $150 with a 22,000 hour output life. It's sealed into a deeply powder-coated cast-aluminum housing, comes with the tilting stainless bracket shown (but not the jury-rig strap), and seems very solidly built. At left is an OceanLED Amphibian A6, which is mainly meant as an underwater light but somehow dissipates heat well enough through its polymer housing (and Tritonium lens) to be used anywhere. The bracket shown, which can cleverly fix the A6 any which way, is a new OceanLED accessory (so far not on its web site). Amphibian A6's draw .5 amp, claim a 40,000+ LED life, and retail for about $330. To my eyes, and to those of several Gizmots, the Lumitec is a brighter light...
A big thanks to both ScanStrut and SeaView for contributing mast mounts to the ongoing Gizmo radar testing program (will it ever end?). I found the SeaView SM-18-R to be as solid and easy to install as the ScanStrut. In fact, having just two feet instead of four might make the SeaView a little stronger and easier to align (though there may be a reason for the four-footed design I haven't understood yet?) SeaView also offers the optional canting feet shown attached in the photo above, which made the Gizmo flying bridge mount possible...
That's Eric Braitmayer, Imtra's marketing guy, and he's got lots to be happy about. The years of having to carefully explain the relative pros and cons of LED and halogen marine lighting are over. He's confident that the Ventura PowerLED upper left is as bright as a similar size 20 watt halogen fixture while being fully dimable (without RFI issues), much cooler, and much, much more power efficient. In fact, Imtra is phasing out of halogen lighting altogether, and recently announced significantly increased LED sales despite the 'downturn'. In other words, lots of boaters and boatbuilders apparently agree with Imtra that LED technology has advanced beyond the confusion area. Not that I would just go buy any old LED...
The U.K. company Scanstrut has been making all sorts of radome mounts and similar gear since 1986, and I know I'm not the only one who's admired their smart and handsome engineering. I learned at the Miami show that they were working on a line of universal electronics pods, and today that line is not only official, but a few nice new design twists are revealed. For instance, the preview literature for the Deck Pod above -- meant to mount MFDs up to 15" on fly bridges and the like -- illustrated its heavy duty silicone gasket and other features, but showed a mount that "only" swiveled. Well, look what they came up with for the finished product; apparently you can just unlock that lever and position the ball-mounted pod however you'd like. Nice! I've long held that such view flexibility can make displays more useful in varying light conditions, and I've often proven the postulate using RAM mounts, but this looks like a truly elegant solution...
Dutch Panbo reader Eric Criens (thanks Eric!) reports that this good looking LED strip lighting on his 25–year-old Midget 26 (still in production) was easily fashioned from a relatively inexpensive Ikea “Dioder” kit (see below and this alternative). Apparently you can just cut off the transformer and feed 12 volts to the two wires on the white-only strips to get the above. But if you want to go snazzy, Eric says the four wires on the multicolor versions can be fritzed with to produce a choice of white or red illumination. (Report back if you figure out exactly how.)
This is more than usually peripheral to “marine electronics” but these days everything electrical on boats is coming together, and, besides, I like it! Arid Bilge Systems makes what appear to be vacuum pumps that suck nearly every last drop out of areas that are never completely dried by conventional bilge pumps as well as odd places like compressor pans that can’t be serviced by conventional bilge pumps. I say “apparently” because I can’t find much on that company site about the specific technology (or pricing). But Arid Bilge does do a good job of explaining the many benefits of a truly dry boat, to which I will add my 2 cents…
Last winter, thanks to Lee Guite of East Boothbay, I tried some LED bulbs Lee used to replace the incandescent ones in the Aqua Signal nav lights aboard his Dulcinea. Lee got pretty carried away researching available replacement bulbs and the ones he finally chose were “flux” models from the LED Shop in Australia. In the photo above I was trying to get a camera comparison of his steaming light versus an OGM combo LED running light. They both seemed fairly effective, but now the LED Shop has more powerful SMT bulbs, and Orca Green Marine has dropped the multi-LED models altogether in favor of single LED lights. I don’t know much about LEDs, but they do seem to be in a state of rapid technological change, which means that one LED may perform quite differently than another, and none of them may be what we’ll be using a few years hence.
Bebi Electronic’s LED lights most likely don’t employ the latest technology, like touch dimming, but there’s a lot to like about them. The company purportedly provides clean work for folks living in the village of Nakabo, Fiji, which is about 40 kilometers from the nearest power line. Bebi has all sorts of styles, including units that can be used for running and anchor lights, and prices seem quite reasonable. This Beka style cockpit light, for instance, is cleverly housed in a PVC pipe cap and only costs $36.50. I saw it last summer hanging aboard Dan Gingras’s Lionheart (thanks, Dan!).
Neato! Touch the red button on this new Hella Marine EuroLEDTouch dome light, and you get red light; hold your finger there for two seconds and it will cycle through four dimming levels. The white button gets you white light, and your preferred dimming level is remembered for each color until you do the two second thing again. The dome is 5” across, 1.2” deep, completely waterproof, retails at $180, and can be had with a black shroud instead of the white shown. Hella doesn’t claim any sort of brightness equivalency for this LED fixture, unlike, say, Sailor’s Solutions 10–watt-halogen claim for its Sensibulb. I dare guess that Hella is using up-to-date LED technology, but I have learned that all LEDs are not the same, by any means. Maybe I can get one of these to test alongside the new version Sensibulb that’s headed this way.
