6:30am at the Bitter End Yacht Club, British Virgin Islands: the picture, of course, misses salient details—like the gulls rapping as they work over some leftover conch fritters, or the gentle breeze wafting through my tiki. A lot of us have made this little corner of the vast resort into part time offices as this is where the WiFi signals are the strongest (and there’s a waitress). Unfortunately the BEYC’s own free WiFi has not been connecting to the Internet for a couple of days now. I asked about it at the front desk yesterday and a nice lady there gave me a sympathetic (perhaps pitying?) look and lilted: “Da Internet?…oh, sometimes dat works, and sometimes dat don’t.”
It’s amusing how my little neighborhood on the back side of Camden—once the home of those who manned mills powered by the Megunticook River, and hence called Millville—is now home to some weirdly modern worker bees. While I’m plugging away at Panbo World Headquarters, a good neighbor, Peter Lindquist, is around the corner scanning and cataloging an enormous collection of marine photographs taken by a character named Red Boutilier back in the 60’s and 70’s (when the mills were winding down). The collection belongs to the Penobscot Marine Museum, where it will be part of this summer’s feature exhibit: “Through the Photographer's Lens: Penobscot Bay and Beyond.” This particular shot shows a man aboard the sardine carrier Delca making a call on what I think is an early VHF (?). A typed note in the negative box states that the 78’ Delca was built in 1936 as a minesweeper, then rigged over when the Port Clyde Packing Company bought her after WWII. Then she “worked steady until she sunk on Sept. 7, 1989, 1 mile northeast of Old Cilley Ledge Bell. She was loaded with 1,418 bushels of herring when she went down {due to losing a plank}. Capt. Peter Grew {perhaps above} and mate Dennis Tupper were rescued by the crew of the F/V Diane and James.”
This sailor wouldn’t want to heel too far, or that monster mobile might slide and break his foot! I found this shot at Ericsson’s press site, where the box is identified as an MTD mobile phone from Svenska Radioaktiebolaget (or SRA, an Ericsson subsidiary), circa 1980. The technology has, um, evolved. What I was actually looking for was the new, and amazingly full-featured, Ericsson W25 fixed cellular. It can use either tri-band CDMA or quad-band GSM, including three fast data protocols, to connect most anywhere on earth to using whatever you can attach via two phone jacks, four Ethernet ports, and WiFi. It also features fax support, ac/dc flexibility, twin USB ports for “print server and/or mass storage”, and an external antenna option. I don’t know what it costs, and—according to Alan Spicer, where I found out about it—you can’t quite get one yet, but it certainly appears to fit into the supercellularistic heart-of-a-boat-network category.
That’s a Shakespeare CruiseNet Cellular Router set up at the Miami Boat Show, where it was cruising the Internet at a zingy 3Mb, and serving it up via the WiFi router at left, which is plugged into one of its four Ethernet ports. When installed on a boat those dual stubbies would be replaced by a pair of marine cell antennas, because CruiseNet’s high performance design incorporates antenna diversity technology. Another reason for its somewhat jaw dropping cost—models start around $1,600, street, without the antennas!—is the industrial-strength, full-power cell transceiver built into the box. Most of the other cellular routers that boaters are fooling with—like the Junxion Box or the Kyocera KR1, or even KVH’s TracNet 100–use a wimpier PC-card-style consumer-grade radio that you supply. CruiseNet also includes a one year subscription to the “Full-Throttle” proxy server compression service Shakespeare has set up (renewable at $50/year), and it somehow establishes a static IP address, which apparently is not easy on a cell network. The IP address means that CruiseNet and everything attached to it can be queried from other computers, which leads to all sorts of possibilities, as was illustrated by the control and monitoring test board Shakespeare had set up in its booth. This product could the heart of a very connected boat, at least until you get 20–50 miles off the U.S. coast, where Sprint and Verizon broadband always-on data service ends. I’m working on an article about connected cruising, and would love to hear how people are using WiFi, cell, sats, SSB, and/or pigeons to stay in touch, or whatever.
Well, Inmarsat’s 2004 projections on the size and timing of marine BGAN may have been a bit optimistic, but the fourth generation birds are in place and the service appears to getting more and more mobile, like this ruggedized Hughes 9201 (thanks, Russ!). “The unit supports speeds of up to 464/464 Kbps transmit/receive, has a built-in WiFi access point/router, and supports dedicated IP QoS at up to 128 Kbps. It is also software upgradeable to the high-performance Class 11 land vehicular rating, which will operate with Inmarsat's BGAN-X network expected to be commercially launched later in 2007.” I don’t yet know what BGAN-X is, but I’ve heard that this nearly global broadband service will eventually come to boats in Fleet 33 size antenna domes. Meanwhile Steve Dashew has sniffed out BGAN pricing, which seems pretty good, and is apparently experimenting with his own funky marine version using a FollowMeTV tracker (a neat product I’ve been meaning to Panbo about for some time). As I’ve said before, the Dashew family’s SetSail.com is a great resource.
I’m hesitant about using Panbo as a bug list, but, geez, I’ve been getting bombed with bug reports. So, here goes:
It seems that some or all Icom 802s, almost undoubtedly the premier SSB marine radios, have a clipping problem as noted here at Lectronic Latitude, and here at Icom itself.
A reader reports that his Raymarine E-Series Sirius Weather system messes up some NOAA buoy reports, specifically showing oddly high wind speeds. I don’t have a link to this but have seen correspondence with Raymarine which admits that it is their problem, not Sirius’s, and promises “to address it in a future E-Series software release” (which is less aggressive that the reader would like).
Another reader reports another weirdo: apparently some older Garmins stop sending valid NMEA messages at 23:59:59 GMT. Pascal and others are on the case at rec.boats.electronics. I also got some graphics from a Panbot which showed how a certain BlueChart v8 Bahamas chart was out of whack, putting the routes he’d carefully collected on a Blue Chart v6 into foul waters. They are worth an entry one day to reinforce the point that more than one navigation source is always a good idea!
Finally, the latest version of MaxSea apparently refuses to open virtual com ports created by the Bluetooth protocol stack, according to ShipModul which makes a nifty BT equipped multiplexer (I’ve been trying). Older versions of MaxSea supposedly do not have this problem.
I just finished a June PMY column about how the gauge manufacturer Faria is busting out into marine electronics. I visited their Connecticut factory in January and then saw more of their Maestro do-it-all touch screen system in Miami. I’m hot to tell you more about Maestro but am going to wait until Faria puts it up on its Web site (hint, hint). In the meantime, take a gander at the WatchDog 750. Right now it’s aimed at the commercial fishing boats mandated to report positions and catches—i.e. the Vessel Monitoring System, or VMS—but dealers are telling Faria that it’s suitable for the bluewater cruising market. No kidding! The 750 combines Iridium and GSM transceivers for “least cost” global tracking/monitoring/email. Who’d want that? Be sure to check out the demo of WatchDog’s server side abilities (though the link seems a bit flaky and may need a few tries). Then imagine a cruising version of this dual-mode comms integrated with a dedicated touch screen navigation, engine monitoring, digital switching, etc. boat PC. By the way, I think we’re going to see a number of multi mode marine comms devices like this and Syrens WiFi/cell.
We didn’t get a lot of submissions to the Ideal Marine Electronics project last week, but all are juicy. I’m particularly tickled with this diagram, sent in by an English sailor who writes his own blog with some good m.e. content. There are a few items that I still don’t understand, or may be mistakes, but if you look at the full image here, you can quickly see what gear is aboard Enterprise and how it works together. Go here to see the latest submissions, and then try to top Russ with a graphic explanation of your ideal system. Thanks!
Yesterday David Pogue of the New York Times wrote a pretty glowing review of a new Web-centered phone and voice mail management service called GrandCentral. The central idea is one single phone number for life, and the central technology seems to be some slick switching software that can, for instance, ring either or both of my physical phones instantly if, say, I want to initiate a call from my GrandCentral voice mail box (which imported a big Outlook contact list flawlessly), or decide to record a custom greeting for that test Call Me button up there. So, yeah I spent some time signing up for a free GrandCentral account and testing some of its many features, and I too am pretty blown away.
I think I had a pretty good idea yesterday, encouraging you all to submit your visions of ideal gear set-ups, but I made it much too complicated. Now you’ll see below that I’ve simplified the categories into classic “good, better, best” terms, and also started (crude) Web pages for system descriptions that come via email. These could become valuable resources not only for my writing projects, but for anyone trying to think through a nav/comms system of their own. Isn’t it interesting, for instance, that the first two submissions in the “better” category represent two quite different approaches and brand choices (both reasonable, I think)? Richard’s came with these photos of his Mac Mini install, and his “Thanks to GPSnavX for giving me the privilege to not have to run Windows for navigation!”, which makes the second time this week that he’s gotten raves here.
