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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