The screen shot above could be from a “game” called Ship Simulator 2008, which in itself is pretty neat. (First I tried the demo, and then 17 Euros and a 705mb download later, I owned the darn thing ;-). But, in fact, the screen came from Raymarine Marketing Manager Jim McGowan who is using a beta copy of Ship Sim Pro 2.0, which among many other enhancements supports up to 8 serial ports that can send 23 NMEA 0183 output sentences and understand 9 input sentences…
Airmar’s new H2183 heading sensor is motion compensated every which way; i.e. it’s a 3-axis solid-state compass integrated with a 3-axis accelerometer and a 3-axis rate gyro. That’s news both in terms of real world compass precision and the masthead performance of Airmar’s PB200 Weather Station, whose gyro only senses yaw…
Try as I might, my photograph (click it for bigger) still fails to truly illustrate how sharp and color rich this sample of Raymarine’s new A-Series actually is. And I haven’t yet subjected it to bright sunlight, which may mute the goodness considerably (hey, we’ve got two feet of snow on the ground here, people, and the snow banks chest high!). But I did bench test it for a couple of hours yesterday, which included…
Hey, look at the menu bar up to the right: now there’s a Forum link, and it works! Of course there’s hardly anything there yet, and I’m still struggling with the issue of categories, but the possibilities are terrific…
Finally got back in the lab on Friday, and it was a real pleasure to hook up the new Garmin wind whirly. I’ll start, though, with my main complaint so far, which is the mast mounting scheme…
A major press event in Miami was FLIR’s on water demo of its neat new mid-priced M-Series dual camera system, which I’ll cover next week. But first I’ll discuss the recent efforts of two FLIR competitors to make enhanced vision more “affordable”. Above is VEI’s OceanView Apollo II, which features…
Smaller, better, cheaper! McMurdo’s new Fast Find 210 PLB is just a bit over four inches long (my model has small hands), but features not only a 50 channel GPS but also an SOS flashing LED. And it will probably retail for under $300. I say probably because…
Either XM or Sirius Weather and Audio is now available on nearly all major MFD brands. Above is Sirius seen on the new Lowrance HDS during the Broadband Radar demos. The implementation looked very good (as did the whole HDS package, more on that soon), but in truth all the satellite weather implementations seem to be getting better. I spoke with both XM and Sirius representatives at the Boat Show and their message was that…
I got aboard a demo of the new Raymarine C-Series Widescreens last week and was fairly impressed. While I don’t really care that these 16 x 9 aspect ratio screens are “theater like”, I do believe in getting the biggest display possible, and this format helps, because…
I jetted away from the Miami Boat Show (on a half-empty plane!) with loads of coming Panbo electronics material, but first I’ll discuss the behind-the-booth question of the show: How bad will 2009 be?
