Author Articles

by Ben Ellison

Argonaut Tflex-G615

By Ben Ellison | Posted February 2007 | Add a Comment

Argonaut has broken a significant price barrier with the $995 waterproof and sunlight-viewable Tflex-G615 monitor. Its claim of an enormous 2,000-nit illumination equivalence may be exaggerated (the transflective technology used along with some standard backlighting is not really measurable), and in fact the G615 is not quite as bright as the same-size and

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Si-Tex ColorMax 15

By Ben Ellison | Posted February 2007 | Add a Comment

The $3,179 ColorMax 15 offers good multifunction display (MFD) for the money. The 15-inch, 1024x768-pixel screen is bright and sharp, rendering full-screen video as well as any MFD I’ve tested. The unit also has VGA out for a repeater and no fewer than five NMEA 0183 ports for AIS, GPS, autopilot, etc. The ColorMax 15 also supports every feature in the C-Map Max

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Sailor’s Solutions Sensibulb

By Ben Ellison | Posted February 2007 | Add a Comment

While all LED interior lights are long-lasting and energy-efficient, the quality of their light can vary significantly. The SensiBulb lives up to its claim: the warm color, intensity, and beam width of a 10-watt halogen bulb.The basic $40 bulb fits as is into most dome lights, and accessories enable retrofitting to many standard reading lamps. The

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SolLight LightShip

By Ben Ellison | Posted February 2007 | Add a Comment

The LightShip’s LEDs may be ordinary, even somewhat wimpy, but it gives you a choice of regular white or red save-your-night-vision colors, and it’s both waterproof and solar-powered. Thus the cute three-suction-cup, flying-saucer-like design makes sense; stuck to a sunny hatch or port, the $15 LightShip gathers energy for the night ahead, to be used either in

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Here Comes Class B

By Ben Ellison | Posted February 2007 | Add a Comment

Thanks to Software Radio's all-in-one PCB, firms like Comar coan easily produce Class B AIS units-once they are approved.That printed circuit board (PCB) at right may not look like much, but it's a key ingredient to the any-moment-now advent of Class B AIS transponders, and for that we kiss it. The evolving Automatic Identity

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Northstar M121

By Ben Ellison | Posted February 2007 | Add a Comment

I first knew the 12-inch Northstar M121 MFD as the Navman 8120. Now it not only has joined the Northstar family (upper right in group photo) but has gained a new little brother, the 8.4-inch M84, and brought along some 27 various Explorer smaller boat cousins. The latter are all based on Navman designs, only with black buttons and in some cases upgrades like

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Poly-Planar Modular Marine Stereo

By Ben Ellison | Posted January 2007 | Add a Comment

One sign of how deeply Poly-Planar rethought marine stereo is that it takes a while to fully comprehend its flexibility, power, and thorough boat-worthiness. Start with the basic $500 package, a MRD-70 combo AM/FM receiver and no-skip CD/MP3 player paired with a RD-44 control head; everything's waterproof, even the cable connectors, and the head, in either gray

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Hatteland Series 2

By Ben Ellison | Posted January 2007 | Add a Comment

Hatteland Display, a large Norwegian manufacturer with an excellent behind-the-scenes reputation, is going public with its new Series 2 Marine Multi Displays (MMD) and Marine Multi Computers (MMC). The interesting idea here is that interchangeable "backpacks" make identical slim-line screens into either conventional multi-input monitors or compact all-in-one

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Raymarine LifeTag MOB System

By Ben Ellison | Posted January 2007 | Add a Comment

Unlike some safety gear, you'll never have to worry if LifeTag is going to work when you need it. That's because it's what might be called an "alarm-on-failure" system; the receiver triggers an alarm whenever one of the constantly transmitting pendants goes out of its 30-foot range (overboard!), if it breaks or loses battery power, or when a wearer pushes his or

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POI'd Off

By Ben Ellison | Posted January 2007 | Add a Comment

This C-Map POI data is the best available, but it's still full of errors.It's my good fortune that I get to spend many a fine summer's day hanging around beautiful, bustling Camden Harbor, Maine. Often I'm fooling with some new charting wonder because that's my job, and often I'm also scanning locally busy VHF channels because I'm

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