The heh, heh irony in the promo at right is that what really looks good is the little wireless fob tied to the pneumatic lady’s bikini sash. Right. But it does actually look good; Virtual Lifeline can supposedly be easily setup with any outboard or inboard engines so that they will shut down if anybody on board goes overboard. This product just won a safety Innovation Award at the MAATS show in Las Vegas. The electronics award was split between two products we’ve already talked about here—Navionics’ Platinum charts and Humminbird’s side scanning sonar. It’s not online but I just purloined a list of all the entries to the contest, and there are some neat items I had not heard of. More later.
Unfortunately Web posting at PMY has gotten a little slow lately—just so many minutes in the day—but my June Wifi column is now up. It includes a thumbnail of this picture above, which deserves more detail. That’s a gentleman named Park Walker who lives aboard a 41’ Little Harbor trawler with the fine name of Om Sweet Om. He’s had good luck using WiFi to do some technical consulting while cruising. "Without wireless I would be severely restricted in where and when I could roam. Now my clients ask 'Where are you today?'." The details of Park's sophisticated setup are worth knowing for those of us who’d like to do something similar:
I have a 9dBi omni-directional antenna mounted on my radar arch with 25ft of LMR400 cable running into the main cabin. The antenna cable is connected to a LinkSys WET11 wireless bridge. This is an 802.11b device that operates as a pass-thru client rather than a router. The ethernet interface is currently connected to the WAN port on a Netgear WGR614 which provides wireless service to the desktop computer and the laptops on-board.
The LinkSys box is what makes the connection to the available WiFi service. With the 9dBi antenna I have been able to connect to base stations with a clear line of sight up to about 1 mile from the boat. We used it extensively in the Abacos over a two month period roaming from Green Turtle to Little Harbor without ever being without a usable signal. I didn't go with a higher gain antenna as this one suited my needs, but the range can be increased to 5 or 6 miles using a 15dBi standard antenna and even more using amplification.
Running the connection from the LinkSys into the Netgear router provides NAT, DHCP and a firewall to the computers on-board. While in a marina I typically make the service available to neighboring boats who happen to find out that it's available, although I have started putting MAC address filtering in place to keep track of who is using it.
The original hi res picture, by the way, was taken by Park and send via WiFi.
Alrighty, then, it’s Uniden Day. While getting links for the earlier entry, I spotted this new Bluetooth cordless phone system that just might be terrific for bigger yachts. The key feature is connectivity between a Bluetooth cell phone and the base station which supports up to 10 cordless handsets. Hence you could tuck your precious cell away on the boat, safe from saltwater and preferably connected to an amp and high gain marine antenna. Bluetooth headsets are also supported, which means that some yachties may eventually look like those guys at the airports with blue LEDs blinking on their ears.
I actually think that the most important innovations in marine networking are happening over wires — Ethernet and NMEA 2000 wires — but some of the wireless happenings certainly are, er, sexy. I tested Uniden’s first WHAM wireless mic and, while it worked OK, the screen was hard to read and the overall build quality didn’t impress. Now I’ve seen a prototype of the second generation WHAM and it is a whole new animal. Not only does the screen look very readable, but it now has greater range and function. It seems possible that you’ll be able to wander anywhere on a boat, and maybe a ways down the docks, easily carrying full power (25W) VHF and intercom capabilities. I’m supposedly on the list to try a couple of WHAMs, along with the interesting UM625c (for color) fixed radio, soon.
Just got a note from a beloved, though former, in-law who’s wicked frustrated in his quest to find the right radar/plotter for his classic sail boat. The Raymarine C80 would do the trick, except for all the “damn cables”:
“There are at least three of them to allow for radar, gps, and power, and more if you want more instruments. And these are not lightweight lamp cords, either: the C-series specs tell us to allow 8" clearance behind the instrument for the radar cable. Absurd. And it really ties down the unit to a very fixed mount, which is my ultimate objection. I'd like to have it mounted at the nav station, but be able to swing it out to the cockpit at need. It's possible, but with all those heavy cables, very clumsy and inelegant.”
He wonders if there is a black box solution with wireless display? There is the Panasonic MDWD and other untethered PC solutions, not to mention some really interesting wireless instruments coming from the likes of TackTick and Deep Blue Marine, but a real marine portable multifunction display doesn’t really exist…yet. The good news is that most of the big boys—Furuno, Northstar, Garmin, and Raymarine—now use Ethernet to connect multiple displays, which means a WiFi connection is quite possible. (My “it could be worse” photo shows one locker on the bridge of a mega yacht under construction in Italy.)
I’ve learned a lot about how boaters are using WiFi along the our coasts, and it’s darn exciting. Savvy folks are using the Internet to the max for fun, work, and even cruise planning (weather, slip reservations, etc.) using fast wireless connections, either free or from dedicated marine services, in anchorages and marinas from the Abacos to the Straits of Georgia. You won’t hear much about this in the marine press because it’s kind of a helter skelter scene with very few big players.
Yet a clear key to success is good equipment. You might find an occasional hotspot using Centrino built in WiFi and standard Windows XP WiFi software but you’ll do a whole lot better with a high power (200 mw) WiFi card or USB device connected to a high gain (6–12 db) 2.4 GHz omnidirectional antenna with low loss LMR400 coax cable and some decent WiFi software (like the free program available from Boingo). You won’t find this stuff at Staples! And so far hardly any regular marine electronics outlets have gotten into this market. Places to look for long range WiFi gear are: Broadband Express, a Pacific Northwest marine service provider (gear shown); MarineNet, a Florida marine communications outfit; and HyperLink Technologies, a commercial all-things-wireless equipment vendor (where there’s also great detail on which cards use which connectors, etc.).
Heck, let’s make this Jeffrey Siegel day at Panbo. You see what I didn’t mention below is that Siegel is also the developer of Maptech’s Outdoor Navigator, an excellent PDA (Palm and PPC) charting program that I wrote about back in early 2002 and which has recently evolved in very interesting ways. I thought it was a pretty good deal at $100 with a year access to all the U.S. charts or topos you wanted to download, but now ON costs a mere $20 and you can keep downloading maps as long as you own the PDA it’s registered to. ON also now works on "Smartphones" using Microsoft's cell operating system. The phones from Audiovox, Motorola, and others do not have touch screens, so all ON's controls have been neatly moved to the keypad. Jeff, who naturally is cruising with all versions of his creation, notes that the lack of a touchscreen is one reason why his smartphone has an extra long battery life. He also notes how useful ON is just as a chart reference tool, no messing with a GPS, especially as Maptech corrects the charts on their servers every month. The whole ON story is here.
Another item in the May PMY is my test of WeatherWave, a neat service that delivers NOAA alerts to your cell phone and also lets you dial up specific forecasts and buoy reports. I note that it will work on any phone because its servers convert NOAA text to voice. That’s in contrast to Ekkosoft’s MarineWeather, another clever service that translates NOAA alerts and forecasts into informative graphics (right). You do need to be using Verizon Wireless on a handset that supports “Get It Now” applications, but I was very impressed with the results when I tried it. Both services can get a boater just what they need from NOAA’s vast weather resources…without having to wait through a long and tedious VHF loop.
Check out this article if you're thinking about Wi-Fi enabling your boat. Also have a look at HauteRoute's Distance Calculator...
"When used in conjunction with extended range base station equipment such as the HauteRoute HR-2611DX 802.11b Access Point, HR-3054DX 802.11b/g Access Point or the HR-5354DX 802.11a/b/g Access Point, and appropriate outdoor antennas, users can expect line of sight and near line of sight performance ranges measured in miles rather than feet."
Although we are seeing more and more Bluetooth enabled devices appearing in the marine electronics environment, I stll very strongly believe that ZigBee has many advantages over Bluetooth in a typical boating context. I can't imagine that it will take very long for a smart marine electronics manufacturer to incorporate this technology in a new range of products. Here's a nice update on the state of ZigBee.
"Given enough devices spread around a house, this multi-hop �mesh networking� approach can use redundant pathways to make sure the message gets through even if one of the devices is out of order. For example, if you were sitting in bed and flipped a portable switch to preheat the hot tub in the back yard, the message might normally pass through a node in the kitchen. However, if your kitchen ZigBee�s battery died, the message could still get through in a wireless version of an end-around play. By simultaneously transmitting the message to the den, your tub switch could bypass the kitchen transmitter, still getting the �on� message to the tub. But because another major ZigBee innovation is power efficiency, the kitchen battery is not likely to go dead in the first place. By instructing nodes to wake up only for those split second intervals when they�re needed, ZigBee is so chintzy with electricity that batteries might last for years."
The heh, heh irony in the promo at right is that what really looks good is the little wireless fob tied to the pneumatic lady’s bikini sash. Right. But it does actually look good; Virtual Lifeline can supposedly be easily setup with any outboard or inboard engines so that they will shut down if anybody on board goes overboard. This product just won a safety Innovation Award at the MAATS show in Las Vegas. The electronics award was split between two products we’ve already talked about here—Navionics’ Platinum charts and Humminbird’s side scanning sonar. It’s not online but I just purloined a list of all the entries to the contest, and there are some neat items I had not heard of. More later.
I actually think that the most important innovations in marine networking are happening over wires — Ethernet and NMEA 2000 wires — but some of the wireless happenings certainly are, er, 
Just got a note from a beloved, though former, in-law who’s wicked frustrated in his quest to find the right radar/plotter for his classic sail boat. The 
I’ve learned a lot about how boaters are using WiFi along the our coasts, and it’s darn exciting. Savvy folks are using the Internet to the max for fun, work, and even cruise planning (weather, slip reservations, etc.) using fast wireless connections, either free or from dedicated marine services, in anchorages and marinas from the Abacos to the Straits of Georgia. You won’t hear much about this in the marine press because it’s kind of a helter skelter scene with very few big players. 
Heck, let’s make this Jeffrey Siegel day at Panbo. You see what I didn’t mention 
Another item in the May PMY is my 
Check out 
I can't imagine that it will take very long for a smart marine electronics manufacturer to incorporate this technology in a new range of products. Here's a nice