The Offshore Voyaging Reference Site

Marine Electronics System Recommendations

JHHGH1_9894

Up to this point in this Online Book we have been writing about good navigation practices. Now let’s turn our eyes to the cool electronic toys we all love.

And since I’m an electronics technician by trade and have spent most of my working life in high tech fields this is going to be leading edge stuff and way cool!


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Dick Stevenson

Hi John,
Some excellent thoughts there. I can still remember the first time that I realized I was choosing not to utilize a piece of equipment’s full potential. It was a VCR television recorder. And in some ways it was a sobering moment and merely an inkling of what was to come. Now I suspect I am just accessing a very small percentage of my phone’s or computer’s capabilities.
And I very much agree that the three mentioned technologies have made by far the greatest contribution to off-shore and coastal cruising.
My best, Dick Stevenson, s/v Alchemy

Jo

Recently I had to rethink the equipment of the boat. It came equipped with some old stuff, some reliable, some less, but it needed a DCS VHF Radio and navigation was still based on paper charts. Also I wanted an active AIS transponder.

So I went with a combinaion of a solid core and a collection of toys.

For the core I chose the Standard Horizon GX2000 VHF and the Wheatherdock easyTRX2S-IS-WiFi AIS Transponder with integrated antenna-splitter and wifi. These two boxes provide VHF, AIS transponder and GPS-source via NMEA-0183 for all others. The AIS-box also recodrs the GPS track to an SD-Card for later. It has also an external contact for a buzzer to do collision warning or anchor watch, but I’m still figuring out if I want to rig it up or rely on the VHF for this.

The GX2000 VHF is an interesting beast as it can display AIS data and do collision warning like its expensive brother GX2200, but has no AIS receiver and uses external data via NMEA 0183. It therefore costs only a little more than a regular VHF and a lot less than the VHF with AIS. It’s my simple AIS-Gui that’s always on.

The instrument in the cockpit also picks up GPS, COG and SOG via NMEA-0183 fom the AIS-box and the rest from depth sounder, log an the wind-wane directly.

With these two boxes, the cockpit instrument and some paper chart I can navigate safely in case of need.

For the toys, I use OpenCPN and my iPad as Chart-Plotter. They get the position and AIS via USB or Wifi from the AIS-box. That works great for me under normal circumstances, but being consumer products I don’t expect them to survive in an Oh-Shit-situation.

Radar and electric autopilot are the old systems, working independent of everything else and I wont change them until they break.

Patrick Genovese

One comment regarding OpenCPN, it is now a very mature application and you can now purchase commercial grade charts (UKHO) for it via Chartworld (with updates). I think it is a viable solution for people who want to do PC based navigation.

There are some very useful and nice plugins for it which extend its functionality and if run on a rugged or at least well protected device should be a good solution. Even if OpenCPN is the main “plotter” a backup device would be quite easy and cheap to setup. 2 OpenCPN setups would easily cost less than a decent MFD.

Personally I have had the opportunity to use some commercially available software solutions such as MaxSea and I think that functionally OpenCPN stacks up well against these. It is also quite reasonably “light” in the sense that it does not need a behemoth of a machine to run on. Perhaps the only real down side is the lack of commercial grade support (i.e. get on the phone with someone for help) although having said that the community support is very good.

Naturally it would be wise to make sure that your OpenCPN setup/release is running reliably well before you head offshore but that applies to any piece of gear anyway.

Jo

Patrick, that was roughly my reasoning. For my usage and having some experience with weird software, I couldn’t justify the investment in a complete multi-function-display with chart plotter. The added benefit wasn’t worth the cost.

Concerning the support and warranty, I’ve been burned so many times by bad product quality and support, I’ve even spent part of my life inflicting the same on others, that I don’t accord it much value. The best products don’t need support or can be fixed by the user or by a welder in a shack at the end of a dirt road on a remote island.

And in case my requirement evolve down the road, I’ll be glad not to be saddled by a state-of-the-art-system dating back to 2015. As long as vendors treat their 2010 gear already as totally outdated, only a fool would trust them to still support their actual future-proof wondergear in 2020.

Marc Dacey

This sort of thinking reflects my own. I’m suspicious of integration, and don’t look for reasons to peer at screens unless necessary. I think slaving the autopilot to a GPS waypoint is asking for it; if I steer via pilot to a course and miss an arbitrary waypoint as per GPS, this reveals of course how much leeway I’ve made and even the presence of currents, data points to add to my situational awareness. By the way, I get a laugh from the guys at the boat show when I say that I want simple, rugged, barely interface-able (?) autopilots like the W-H or the ComNav models, as seen on fishing boats.

It’s the same with radar: I don’t want it overlaying the plotter’s chart display; although that’s “nice to have”, it distracts a bit from radar’s primary function, to show us where the hard parts are, the non-AIS-equipped fishing boats, and the squall lines approaching from the rear. The point about “good old sets” being made obsolete, however, is a good one, and we may be forced to get a new “digital” whiz-bang radar for this reason alone.

TomT

I recently learned about combining GPS positioning capability with cached Google Earth or satellite images. This would be a nice resource, especially for a cockpit display rather than a laptop. More information here:

http://www.yachtingworld.com/cruising/google-earth-navigation-61449

Jo

Hi John,

That was also the reason why I put OpenCPN under toys and have also as the other option the iPad. That’s for when I feel like a technical wuss and just want to get there.

Dick Stevenson

Hi John,
Agree. Life is too short to pursue things merely because they are interesting (though, at times, I assuredly do just that). And it may be a modern age skill to “decide” what, among the huge array of technology, will really enhance your life and let the rest go.
Dick