Regardless of anchoring acrobatics -- and just how the heck do you tie this wild 146 foot trimaran alongside a dock, with a line throwing gun? -- M/Y Alastra joins the short list of exotic vessels I'd love to cruise around Penobscot Bay, if only briefly, and if only to freak out the traditionalists. And it's a safe bet that there will be some pretty interesting systems on board; in fact, I heard about this creature because Palladium Systems just announced the monster gear contract they've won. It includes not just their Ethernet/Windows-based SiMON monitoring system -- with some 269 data points reporting to wheel house and engine room, and probably various iThings as well -- but also their new Titan electrical system...
What follows is a first time guest entry by regular Panbo commenter Adam Block, who is planning a 2011 Pacific
crossing aboard his Nordhavn 47 Convexity. Adam says "he had no idea what he was getting into when he started a recent electronics upgrade," but he did manage to convert analog (generator) engine data into NMEA 2000 for display in the N2KView software above and elsewhere. He's also written a clear explanation of the options available for this tricky task, and the specifics of the NoLand RS11 he used...
The Miami demo of Minn Kota's new i-Pilot technology got somewhat humorous. After some time with that trolling motor head turning this way and that as it automatically retraced a GPS track or pulled us along to a waypoint -- where it could even maintain station -- I started thinking of it as a faithful, friendly robot. If I owned one, I might paint eyes and a smile on it to heighten the sensation. And in retrospect it might have been whispering, "Hey, bub, I represent Johnson Outdoors technology prowess; wait until you see Geonav!"
I've been looking through a lot of material on BEP's new CZone system, and finding it impressive. But its descriptive subtitle -- "Networked Control and Monitoring System" -- seems a tad vague to me. In fact, Simrad changed that to "digital switching" when they showed off their nifty CZone integration with the NSE series (covered briefly in a Miami Show entry). It does seem like the handful of manufacturers who dare to compete in this complex, and potentially hairy, niche can't agree about what to call it, but I like "distributed power". You can see why in the simplified CZone sample diagram above; like the competition, those OI modules efficiently distribute an electrical system's core power feed and circuit protection functions to where they're needed, while networking the switching and much more. There is no central breaker panel on this boat, and a lot less wire. The following diagrams tell more about the concept...
Just yesterday, in my blogging birthday post, I commented on Panbo's international reach, and today I've got some interesting evidence (and more tomorrow). That shot of the new Garmin 700 series above was recently sent to me by Petar Maksimovic of Info Team, Garmin's Serbian dealer. And there's more of interest on that screen than just the language. Info Team has been working for nearly a decade to create Serbian road and waterway maps under Garmin's MPC system, and says that its latest SCG RoadMap includes official Plovput data for about 1,600 kilometers of rivers and canals. Apparently that effort was not only an innovation for inland Europe, but also helped Info Team create a market for marine electronics. In fact, the company demonstrated some gear at the recent Belgrade Boat Show that may not have been seen right here in the world's largest ME market yet, as Petar explains...
I've had a Marinico GalvanAlert "Shore Power Corrosion Detector" for a year, but I only got to use it briefly at first. That was time enough to see how handy it is to have a power tester right in hand as you hook up your shore cable. At minimum, a green LED will tell you that a dock receptacle is live. Plus you'll get a red LED if the polarity is reversed, and two yellow levels of warning about stray current in the ground line, i.e. the stuff that can eat metal parts off your boat's bottom. By now I've used the GalvanAlert, which costs about $140, a fair bit at a dock and even in a shed, and have seen how its steady monitoring can reveal shore power mysteries...
Back in 2008 when I delved fairly deep into NMEA 2000 fuel management (1-Garmin, 2-FloScan, 3-Raymarine, 4-Maretron, 5-SmartCraft, and 6-Lowrance), I may have gotten a related concept wrong. While I was mostly experimenting with how fuel flow data gets integrated into an overall system, I noted a couple of times that if you have such data coming out of an electronically controlled engine, it should be more accurate than what can be measured by flow sensors. Well, as suggested by that "Assumed Fuel Consumption" label on that Steyr Motors display above, maybe not...
The average boater doesn't need a power analyzer like this, but battery scrooges and testers like me might be interested. This Medusa Research Pro is actually designed for radio control hobbyists but its features and value appealed to my inner geek, and so far I've been really pleased with what it can do...
Never mind that Mercury promised a NMEA 2000 gateway to its SmartCraft engine monitoring system back in 2001, the one it's poised to actually ship in 2010 looks quite powerful and useful. If you check out the Gateway PDF above linked to this MercMonitor gauge page, you'll see that it can deliver a whole lot of engine messages to your N2K displays. Plus it turns out that a gent named Glen Ersly has installed a prototype system and written about it in some depth...
In
general the feeling was quietly positive. Everyone still around will probably be able to weather the remainder of the economic storm. Attendance today was lower than the earlier two editions I visited, but then this was my first time visiting on the last day so I can't say for
sure how busy it was. Sorry to say, there was no big big news. Still there were a number of exciting new developments. I've kept those to the end of this long mail!
