Passagemaker Magazine

Electronics

that you’d like to answer?

Johnson: Actually one of the great things for rec-marine in particular because you have a multi-user environment—lots of people on board.

By lots, I mean three, four, five people
on board. GO is actually set up for
multiple connections. You could have
three Android devices, two iOS devices
on board. You could have a tablet and
an iPhone. While you can’t all use it
simultaneously in that you only have
one voice or data channel, everybody
can access it. I can easily see a use case
where you have somebody up on deck
texting, somebody down ready to pull
a weather GRIB file down, somebody
with an iPad sending out position
reports every five or 10 minutes. The
Wi-Fi is really useful in a multi-user
environment.

PassageMaker: What do you say the Wi-Fi range is?

Johnson: A hundred feet. There’s probably some variability when you’re talking about boats because the materials that boats are made of may impact that Wi-Fi connectivity.

PassageMaker: I can certainly see myself using this product.

Johnson: We’d be happy to get one down to you to test once we launch.

PassageMaker:That would be great. I’m thinking of going to the Bahamas in June, but that would probably be too soon, no?

Johnson: We expect to be shipping in quantity in Q2. June, we should be able to manage. … Many of your readers are probably fairly comfortable with satellite services. They’ve been using them for years, and that’s always been a big market of ours. They will be able to find GO through the same distribution partners they bought their current products from.

2. SIMRAD FORWARDSCAN SONAR INTEGRATES WITH MFDs I would have bet on Garmin to be the first of the Big Four marine electronics manufacturers to introduce forward-looking sonar for cruisers. In 2012, Garmin acquired Interphase Technologies, a maker of stand-alone forward-looking sonars on the verge of a breakthrough.

Then came the Miami Boat Show in February. And it was not Garmin, but Simrad that announced ForwardScan, a transducer that sends “a clear picture of what’s ahead” to multifunction displays from the Navico family of companies, which also includes Lowrance and B&G.

To be fair, Furuno has long sold an immensely powerful rotating echo sounder capable of looking far forward (and all around). Furuno’s current Searchlight Sonar line began in 2000 with the release of the CH250

This rendering depicts the activation of an alarm when a boat with Simrad ForwardScan sonar approaches shoals.

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