Ha, ha. I'm even lower-tech than you -- I rely most of all on a wrist-mounted jogger's GPS, which displays nothing but position, speed, heading, and bearing to a waypoint, and paper charts. I find I have much better situational awareness when I'm not staring down at a chart plotter.
But still, you can't fight technology, and one wants to get the benefit of technology to the extent possible. Radar overlaid on an electronic chart is definitely a great leap forward.
I guess the correct approach is to invest as little as possible while the industry gets its sh*t together. And use standalone/redundant systems where practical (AIS), and don't try to jump the gun integrating systems that just aren't properly integrated yet. On this subject, I found this excellent post on the Panbo blog:
I've had enough frustrations with mediocre proprietary firmware. I think its best to leave the hardware (sensors, antennas, transceivers, controls) to the hardware people and the software to the software people. Most of the exciting stuff these days is happening with software that runs on a laptop or low-power desktop platform and is always being extended. Platforms like mini-itx may draw a little more power, but at least you're not forced to discard an entire proprietary MFD when you want to get the next release of the software. I've been screwed by Garmin enough times with their awful BlueChart DRM to never want to buy anything from them again. GPSNavX, the Capn, Fugawi, Nobletec, Rose Point Coastal Explorer, etc, etc, are where it's at these days. (sorry if I left a few out) Eventually people will begin thinking twice before dropping $2k on a planned-obsolescence MFD. Companies like Garmin sure don't seem to care about this stuff piling up in landfills after the resale value has been needlessly obliterated. The holy grail is going to be when someone gets an open source navigation/radar/AIS/sonar/NMEA2000 project under way. Wish I had more free time.. Posted by: Aaron at June 10, 2007 11:11 PM Panbo: The Marine Electronics Weblog: Garmin NMEA 2000, not really! Quote:
Originally Posted by defjef  I agree with Dockhead and without a diagram and some help from Brookhouse I could not have made this work. No crashes. And there are stand alone devices which don't "need" to talk and listen.
I was smitten by the idea of the MFD when my Vigil radar went south and the company was out of biz. I bought the C80 and scanner and it was a stand alone radar for a while.
Then I decided to send the GPS output of my CP170 to the C80 and I bought some charts and had two plotters using the same antenna. I then decided to get a ray GPS antenna so I had redundancy and receive the NASA ais as a birthday gift. That's when things got complex and I needed the MUX and the Seatalk interface box. Once that was sorted out I connected the compass so I had both heading and COG on the C80.
I do like the radar overlays on the charts, but I am not a fan of the C80 as it's user interface sucks and I mostly use a hand held iQue3600 in the cockpit for chart reference since I single hand and can't be spending lots of time staring and playing with instruments down below. I typically punch in a waypoint which repeats to cockpit repeaters (both the KVH sail comp and a B&G NMEA repeater, for all the critical data - SOG, COG CTW, DTW, TTG and XTE.
Hopefully this system will work until the industry gets this data /network thing sorted out economically. YUCK |