Thursday, March 28

Browsing: Electronics

Take your pick for your boat: A mobile, easy to take home or carry around your boat iPad tablet, or a fixed-mount chartplotter. You say you’ll take both? You’re not alone. But each one has its own strengths and weaknesses, and you’ll probably end up relying on one more than on the other. An iPad, of course, is a modern platform for navigation, and there are a lot of apps and products available to protect and even mount a tablet on your helm. But how does it compare to a traditional, fixed-mount chartplotter? Both come in various sizes, although chartplotters…

Choosing the right radar for your boat certainly isn’t easy, and a lot of people already have their own ideas about which brand is best, or the most user-friendly, or technologically advanced, or is most compatible with their other electronics. Meanwhile, almost all the major manufacturers keep coming up with their own technologies to produce sharper images, better tracking of nearby vessels and overall improvements in situational awareness and safety. Here’s a look at eight new radars from Furuno, Garmin, Koden, Lowrance, Onwa, Raymarine, SI-TEX and Simrad, from the editors of Marine Electronics Journal. They asked each manufacturer to supply…

Now you can stay connected all the time with the new Shakespeare WebWatch antenna, which brings a Wi-Fi hotspot, cellular data and HDTV to your boat. For its innovative all-in-one connectivity, the WebWatch has won a Top Product award from Boating Industry magazine. You don’t have to worry about sharing WebWatch. It shares its signal with up to 32 users, in case you’re cruising with a whole lot of your best friends. It delivers Internet with speeds up to 4G from a nearby Wi-Fi hotspot or cell network with a user-supplied data-only SIM card, and it has a greater range…

Now you can turn your smart phone or tablet into a FLIR infrared camera with two new devices, making thermal imaging possible anywhere you go. The new FLIR ONE, with an 80×60 pixel resolution thermal camera, and the FLIR ONE PRO, with 160×120 resolution, hook up to your phone or tablet’s USB-C or Lightning connector; a MicroUSB connection will be available later in the year. This means they are compatible with both Apple and Android phones and tablets. The devices, or dongles, are small and light, and represent the third generation of FLIR’s thermal imaging technology. They are compatible with…

Garmin has just introduced the VIRB 360, a versatile, compact, waterproof, spherical 360-degree camera. It offers high-quality video up to 5.7K/30fps, it has four built-in microphones to capture sounds in all directions, and it comes with a 4K Spherical Stabilization to make your video look smooth and steady. And, taking advantage of its built-in GPS (this is Garmin, after all), the VIRB 360 provides custom data overlays for all its settings. “The VIRB 360 lets you relive personal experiences and share them with your friends – from a different point of view, every time,” says Garmin VP Dan Bartel. “VIRB…

It would be hard to find a serious cruising person who, at one time or another, has not turned to ActiveCaptain for help. I know I have, and so has almost everyone I’ve cruised with. Its major strength is its ability to update real-time information about navigation hazards, marinas, anchorages and points of interest supplied by its 250,000 users, and offer all that data digitally on web browsers and most smart phones and tablets. Now ActiveCaptain is moving into an entirely new realm, with its purchase by Garmin, one of the leading electronic companies in the world. The synergies here…

This is just very cool: A new Garmin smartwatch with a dedicated marine GPS that connects to Garmin chartplotters and other electronics on board and even lets you connect to the autopilot so that you can turn, change your heading and steer the boat, all from your wrist. The new device is the Garmin quatix 5 marine GPS smartwatch, designed from Garmin’s Fenix 5 platform. When paired with other Garmin electronics, it can stream NMEA 2000 data to access boat speed, depth, temperature and wind information all to your wrist, no matter where you are on the boat. When paired…

Raymarine’s new Axiom MFDs, which won an Innovation Award at the Miami boat show, are now out in the marketplace, in an entirely new line of 7”, 9” and 12” touchscreens that run 50 percent faster than anything the company has built before. The new Axioms can run multiple programs and come with bright, all-glass optically bonded displays for easy viewing (even if you’re wearing polarized sunglasses), and they have high-speed, quad-core processors running the new Lighthouse 3 operating system. Sonar is built in, including Raymarine’s new RealVision 3D. They come ready for plug-and-play with radar, FLIR, engine gauges, autopilot…

Even in our constantly-on digital world, staying connected isn’t always as easy as it should be, particularly if you’re cruising offshore or out of Wi-Fi range. Everyone wants to stay connected, but it’s often expensive or complicated. Now the new Mazu app from SkyMate helps to solve those problems by making communications and nav functions both easy and inexpensive anywhere in the world. The way it works is certainly easy enough. You download the free Mazu app from the App Store for your iPad. Then you purchase the mSeries  system and install it on your boat (it’s designed to be…

Long a leader in providing sophisticated radar for commercial users, Furuno has just introduced two new features to improve the performance of their X-Class radar units on cruising powerboats as well. By extending the maximum pulse length from 0.8 to 1.2 megaseconds, Furuno has increased the performance in both long- and short-range applications. This means that you can see land masses, for example, in great detail at long range, while you can detect many different targets, clearly and precisely, at short range. The two new features are for Furuno’s NavNet TZtouch and TZtouch2 units, and they’re called DRS12AX and DRS25AX.…

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