Electronics..

Hmm.. This one will probably change as I flush it out a bit.. But I've been giving considerable thought to electronics lately.

Recently as you read in my blog we did a trip up and back to New England and it validated much of my setup. The ARPA was awesome as was the AIS, but I found a few faults and I am going to detail them here.

1) My Radar antenna is interfering with my AIS. Anytime a object goes in front of me I lose them temporarily and I no longer get their name information anymore till they are behind or beside me.. Not good!! A weird quirk is that it seems as though I can see them from far away with the name but as they get closer is when they go away. After reading as much as I can(best place was furuno's ais FA-150 manual) that my metal mast and my radar are the problem. So later I will relocate the antenna down to the pilothouse roof to help eliminate that problem all together.

2) On my short list is to add Furuno's MaxSea software on a laptop for the boat. This will allow me to work on courses and and other things without interfering with person at the helm. A added benefit will be that it appears that the MaxSea software will give me additional AIS information like rate of turn, destination, etc. Also, it appears as though I can click on the AIS object in the plotter screen which is something that I can't do in the Furuno Plotter(you can only do this on the radar).

3) I would DEFINATELY add some type of AIS transmitter. I've spoken about it sooner, but I think it's important that the boats that can kill you can see you. I think this is even more important for sailboats who sometimes even with a fine Furuno Radar they simply don't get picked up(They even had a radar reflector). FYI, I could see the Lobster pots next to them but not the sailboat. A added benefit of AIS thats not talked about is proximity alarms. You can tell it to alarm if the CPA is less then x miles.. Or if the proximity is less then x miles, or if the TCPA(is less then x minutes), etc. How advantageous is that when traveling at sea and you see the blip in the distance.

4) Definitely add Sat Radio and Sat TV. Our trip while pleasant and I caught up on a bunch of books would have been much nicer if I could have been able to get access to these. The problem with these technologies is that they still don't really resolve real blue water travel as they only go out in the ocean so far. I can't wait till they go all the way around the world.

5) Wireless internet, without Sat radio initially and not having TV Wireless internet was big. I was able to get Verizon wireless offshore within 3 miles most of the trip, in fact I was able to get it more offshore then I did in long island sound. A repeater or amplifier would have totally fixed that problem for me I believe.

6) With a lot of electronics comes a lot of draw on the power. I have a 6kw radar(furuno bb), a BB Furuno Plotter, 2 17" monitors, Autopilot, AIS Receiver, Fishfinder, Depth Sounder, a 10" Furuno Plotter up on top, etc. If I were to do this again I would seriously consider 1 or 2 dedicated 4d or 8d batteries with it's own charger off of the engine. This would leave quite a bit of power left over for the house and if I put the radar on for anchor guard I wouldn't kill the house supply. I would then also want a switch to flip to the house bank in case of charger failure or some type of redundancy for the genset to keep the important electronics running.

7) I'm still waiting for the Sat Phone and Internet access via satellite to work itself out in terms of speed and price of minutes. Speed being the primary thing making me wait. When the speed comes, I believe the that there will be more of draw to use that service.

8)On a larger boat then my 44 it would be nice to set up the Genset for autostart in case the batteries fall below x percent. I would really like to explore ways to reduce the number of hours I run on my genset. From a fuel, wear and tear, and putting a load on the genset it just makes sense.

9) Low on the list but maybe if I did bluewater is a water maker. It seems as though the technology is moving along pretty good and soon there will be a lower maintenance reasonably priced option. But right now with us coastal cruising, well water is just way to available for free. Maybe if I was in the islands but as it stands we hold 400 gallons and well we can make that last a while.

10) Last but not least is I would subscribe to some weather service. This would be weather fax, sirius or xm weather, or some other service. This can make all the difference in the world from your trip being enjoyable or a pain. We were VERY fortunate to have some evenly spaced out weather windows, and by using internet webservices like weatherunderground.com I was able to time those trips.


Ok, this may change more later but I figured I would put this down.