When I hinted last week that the new Raymarine i70 all-in-one NMEA 2000 instrument would soon have a new competitor, I honestly didn't realize that the B&G Triton would be announced today (with at least the Australian release online already). The Triton T41 sports a 4.1-inch color display under a 4.6-inch square bezel while the i70 has a 4-inch screen in a 4.53-inch high by 4.3-inch wide case. And I'll bet the Triton is also LED backlit as it too claims wide viewing angles along with a power range of just 50-150 milliamps, which seems similar to Ray's claimed 135ma "typical" usage. You'd almost think that Navico and Raymarine were looking over each other's shoulders!...
With all the fuss about Raymarine's new e7 MFD, the similarly styled i70 all-in-one instrument may not have gotten the attention it deserves. That 4-inch LED-backlit screen is a nice half inch bigger than the ST70, not to mention the very successful Garmin GMI 10, and it looks like the software designers made maximum use of the display space. If you're going to mimic an analog dial on a rectangular screen, that flattened style above makes sense. (And note the dots showing minimum, maximum, and average wind angles, a graphic nicity that I liked on the original ST70 but still haven't seen elsewhere.) You can find out more about the i70, and the new p70 autopilot heads, at this Raymarine page, but I came across a dealer presentation that has some extra details...
It's great that the NMEA's magazine Marine Electronics Journal is available online these days, but I screen captured that two page spread above for reasons that may not please the organization. The "NMEA 2000, Doing it right" cover story of that May/June issue is a series of interviews with several dealer/installers, and while it's pleasing to hear that the Standard is really happening -- it's part of most new installs, and seen as a good thing for all parties -- I found the interviewer's emphasis on avoiding non-certified N2K products a bit odd. And in the "Tech Update" seen above, my friend and NMEA Technical Director Steve Spitzer doubles down on this theme, which -- sorry, Steve -- deserves some debate, I think...
The AIS Summit began today in Hamburg, Germany, and SRT took the occasion to announce a boat load of newly available OEM AIS modules (download PDF here). Of course that means that other companies have to brand and sell the gear above -- or build their own devices based the same internal technology -- but I have reason to believe that in at least one interesting case that will happen soon, and, in fact, several of the items above seem like they will be interesting products eventually...
An energetic but somewhat chaotic frontal system passed over Maine last Thursday afternoon but I was able to keep on boating largely thanks to Garmin's new GDL 40 cellular weather system, which I'm getting to test somewhat ahead of the shipping date. The severe thunderstorm warning that headlined most of the NOAA coastal forecasts might have kept some people off the water. (The forecast areas greyed out on the screen above all have some sort of warning, as shown in the inset, as well as the full text, which can be called up.) But the animated Nexrad precipitation radar, along with lightning strike data, indicated that that my bit of Bay was going to enjoy a frontal hole...
Maretron's Rich Gauer has repeatedly tried to explain to me how NMEA 2000 is an impedance-driven networking technique and that's why it's so important that the cabling have the right electrical characteristics with the proper termination. He can get quite passionate about the subject, almost poetically describing clean waves of N2K data bits getting distorted by reflections to the point that microprocessors along the backbone can't recognize them anymore. But then again Rich is an electrical engineer and Maretron may well have more troubleshooting experience than any other company with the large N2K networks where impedance problems tend to show up. Installs or other manufacturer's gear that cause trouble because the impedance rules aren't abided to get him upset! However, a guy like me is way better at visualizing the dynamics of a hull passing through ocean waves, and I couldn't begin to fathom the "Transmission Lines, Reflections, and Termination" PDF Rich once linked me to. Which is why I am especially taken with the graphic N2K analysis (above) that our friend Kees Verruijt posted on his Yacht Electronics blog...
When Westerbeke developed a NMEA 2000 monitoring and control head for its generators way back in 2006, I thought the other generator manufacturers would follow right along. The approach seemed to simplify cabling and make it possible to at least monitor a generator from other displays if not actually go to the next level where, say, a NMEA 2000 inverter could turn the generator on and off as AC loads changed. To my knowledge that sort of advanced control has not happened yet, though in fact a check of NMEA's database of standard PGNs suggests that it is possible (look in the "power" category). One problem is that so far only Northern Lights seems to have followed Westerbeke's lead, with the WaveNet panel seen above...
Yes, the hardware kit looks just like a Garmin 17x GPS or GXM 51 Satellite Weather rig -- what with three different install options, under deck included, and an N2K cable and tee for power and data -- but in fact it's the company's brand new GDL 40 Cellular Marine Weather Receiver, just announced today and shipping in June. I think it will be an attractive new integrated weather option because the hardware is reasonable at $300 retail and you only pay for the weather data -- available to start along the coasts of the U.S., Canada or Europe -- when you use it. But when you think about what other services could be provided by a two-way GSM cellular modem networked to your boat's NMEA 2000 network and (Garmin) MFDs, I think you'll agree that this may be one of the most important product advances of the year...
A gold star to Raymarine for the E140W's response to an AIS SART test! This seems like exactly the proper plotting behavior described by the USCG AIS expert Jorge Arroyo in a comment to the entry about the easyRescue SART tested. Not only did the E Wide put up an alarm noting the SART TEST message but it also plotted the SART's location with the correct distinctive icon (see inset above). And, as a bonus, it's giving the operator quick soft key or touch shortcuts to setting up a go-to-SART route or dismiss the alarm. But so far the E140W is the only MFD that's so SART friendly and it wasn't until I updated its software this weekend...
Chetco Digital Instruments has been quietly developing software and hardware to digitize and display analog engine info for some time, and with some success I hear. But as of yesterday's big press release, Chetco has jumped big time into marine data networking, particularly the hot, if confusing, area of putting NMEA 2000 messages into an Ethernet format and serving them to whatever wired and wireless devices can use them. So that little $579 SeaSmart device above contains an N2K-to-Ethernet gateway (by Actisense, I think), a WiFi transciever, and a "CGI/AJAX web server" that puts out an "open sourced HTML protocol" that will purportedly support "any application from weather station, dual engines, battery banks, fluid tanks and more." Excited yet?...
