Boat Show 2020: What's New in Navigation Gear for your Boat

[Music] a 20/20 look at electronics for your boat or on your boat so I'm Jeff Cote by the way with Pacific John systems owner operator of that business and and my core I'm a voter right and I hope that's going to come through today in the presentation boating is not a hobby it's a lifestyle and as part of that livestock lifestyle is getting places safely or being willing to go further to places that otherwise without a navigation system you wouldn't have gone I can flashback to 2007 when I went around Vancouver Island and I went to certain Anchorage's that I otherwise would have never been or gone to without a radar overlay or a good sharp water yes I have charts on my boat I remember buying all the charts for Vancouver Island the time was over $2,000 worth of charts paper charts and they're beautiful but what we're gonna be talking about today is not just navigation with paper charts or you know we're gonna be talking with electronics some of you are gonna get a sense a little bit we write a column every month about these topics on Pacific yachting and also in a magazine in the call Northwest yachting in Seattle and Washington State and Oregon also California so if you feel like geeking out all those articles actually you don't even have to be a subscriber you can actually find all those articles on our website as PDFs and HTML they're all there for free so even if you don't have a Pacific yachting article and you want to read about char plotters or anything that we write would have written about on those topics you can find them on our website there's a big take away and we're not gonna be talking about too much about NMEA today in terms of safety but when you are doing electronics for your boat I would encourage all of us right as a boater to take the time to do the install properly I can't tell you how frustrating is going to be in it's almost like Murphy's Law right the day that you're going to need radar is the day that it won't work and if it's because you didn't install it properly or sort of did the electrical not-so-great when you were doing it take the time to do the installation of your electronics or a navigation system for your boat to do it sort of well and there's standards to follow and with regards to electronics it's the National Marine Electronics Association a byc is another Association and that's more related to electrical but there's a good way of doing it and there's a I hope things are gonna work out for me way of doing things and I really think that we should all take the safety Road do it properly make sure that it's as reliable as possible so that we don't have frustration or frustrations later down later down the road so our business specific yacht systems and what I'm going to be sharing with you today is we get invited and I think this as an honor we did a thousand build projects last year that is both scary as a business owner that used to know everything about every single client that I used to work on or do work for now it's way bigger than one person we're a team of 15 and I just want to say that that experience of helping other boaters make the right navigation equipment choices for their boat is what I'm going to be sharing with you today the other thing some of you might know we're a really big proponent of YouTube and sharing our knowledge so if you ever want to revisit this presentation or we're about a hundred and sixty-five videos on YouTube right now and there's another about 30 that have actually been done but yet to be published so by within three four months we'll probably be at about 225 250 videos on YouTube I'll do it yourself I don't think there salesy pretty educational and just show about sharing our knowledge and educating boaters like ourselves making the right choice I was talking in the booth this morning and I was saying it's way it's better to spend time today educating yourself and doing the installation once then purchasing a bunch of equipment installing it and then coming to the realization that it was the wrong choice for your the good news is a lot of choice the bad news is there's a lot of choice right so educate yourself so the next thing we're gonna be this sort of a rough agenda where we're gonna be talking about we're gonna make sense of all the options that you have because there's a lot of choice out there right with regards to the navigation and then we're gonna go through round-robin chartplotter we're gonna look a little bit at apps at the end actually depth sounder radar AIS autopilot cameras and we're gonna go through different sort of categories as an engineer I like lists I like sort of folders and so all this presentation is done per category group okay so the first thing that you've got to realize as a boater and I think this is sort of both good news and bad news is that when you're deciding on what's gonna work for your boat please don't be tempted to simply look at what your neighbors doing you know you could have another fellow owner that has the identical same boat as you do that's a boater just down the dock from your boat but it doesn't mean that they're using the boat the same way you are right and all of us have different budgets it's not so much to say the money you have but it's the money you want to invest in that part of your boat right now as we all know boats can be sort of humbling financially so we might all start with a different prioritization list right like there's multiple buckets on your boat of what you're gonna spend money on one of them is maybe electronics and navigation and within that realm of choices that we're going to talk about remember every one of us there's not really two of us that are the same when we're boating like I have a lot of boaters that have let's say Grand Banks 42 I've done literally probably 50 different Grand Banks 42 projects none of them are the same every one of us are using our boats differently so it's important to not just copy but think it's not what they have it's what do I need on my boat so the first criteria and selecting that is deciding what sort of boating preferences are you doing are you for example add a boater simply going out for a day and then coming back are you going dock to dock are you going further in further afield are you going to be going off a three-month journey up there Scot on the outside of Vancouver Island are you going offshore or are you always going to the same spots maybe the Gulf Islands here locally and you're only doing a weekend trip those are going to be factors that going to influence your decision so don't forget that the other really important takeaway is I rarely and I mean rarely ever start or do an electronics project on a boat and I rip everything that was on the boat honestly there's some projects we do that are two hundred thousand dollars in navigation equipment crazy bridges and trust me there's stuff on that bridge that state they don't need to rip it all out sometimes it's the autopilot the autopilot still works my autopilot is working great I don't need to change it or it might be I have a VHF radio it's DSC so it means distress signal call I can have it integrated with NMEA I can do a 911 call with it don't need to change it so it's not about saying I'm changing my electronics and I'm gonna rip it all of it out there are generally some things on our boat most of the time that can still be kept and that's a way to reduce your costs right so you don't have to do everything there's a trend and in the past certainly there used to be where boaters used to have a display for radar a display for a sounder a display for chartplotter right nowadays boaters are maybe going to do redundancy but they're gonna do redundancy and still have maybe two displays and they're gonna both displays are gonna do radar chart plotter sounder a is target's so we're not necessarily separating things and having dedicated devices for dedicated purposes right as a boater now we're saying okay well maybe I'll have a display up on the flybridge a display on the lower helm or a sailboat I'm gonna have a display inside the helm at the outside helm and one of the chart table so some boaters are saying you know what yeah I'm not going with a dedicated display per purpose I'm going for maybe redundancies in displays but most displays do multiple purposes yes I've been on a boat where we ended up putting eight chart plotters on a bridge on one bridge and yes every single display was doing one thing like locking your TV to just watch fox or CNN or CBC but you can if you wanted see radar on another display right it's a portal remember that's what it is nowadays most of these displays are a portal to pretty much endless information whatever is on the network is going to be able to be seen on that display and then the consideration that I brought about is you know do you have one or two hounds are you gonna have a chart plotter at your chart table if you have a sailboat depending on the type of boater you're gonna have two displays for helm again a lot of choice and obviously cost is a factor right and where you go I can't stress that enough you know there's a big difference between a boater that does a day-trip or one overnight and someone that's gonna go on the outside of Vancouver Island or gonna go up north where literally the first service call is at least a day or two days away right so if the further afield you go the more you want to start considering redundancy right you don't want to have all your eggs in one basket it's worth is you've got to contemplate because things do break down they just do so you got to sort of plan for it and then consider how what are you going to be the redundancies for the navigation system on your boat another big sort of selection criteria that's important to consider nowadays is am I going to go touchscreen am I gonna go buttons or am I gonna do a device that does both right so for example Raymarine was the first that came up come out with a device that does both touchscreen and buttons right still to this day Garmin doesn't do that well maybe I'm the smaller stuff but they're big char plotters are either touchscreen or they're not right so you choose so that's one factor for who knows the same thing so you got to decide do I really you know is this gonna be an inside hell my mom's gonna have warm dry hands or in my Assael border and I'm gonna be outside and now I'm gonna I'm a racer for example you know some people do racing at night well if they're doing that then it might make sense to get a display that you could maybe touch with your hands but also with buttons because in heavy seas it's hard to touch the middle of a screen if it's a touchscreen so another big factor and I was talking about that again this morning is don't get too caught up in all these features that these devices offer over time what I've noticed including myself and I'm a geek is that we end up using a very small fraction of all the features that are available on our chart water right at the end of the day what probably happens is you don't want to get too distracted this is not a video game you're not interfacing your char plotter and you're home on the couch you're going to be navigating you have to be a pilot meaning you have to look at the screen and around you right you can't be so obsessed about this device so people end up doing sort of the basics so don't get too caught up about all the bells and whistles focus on what really works with the chartplotter and yes you can get carried away doing those things but generally you do that away from shore right when you're sort of navigating and there's a lot of open water there's not a lot of traffic and then you might start going in the menu and really getting curious and doing all the cool things you can do but generally most voters will end up doing you know the basics a char plaughter they're gonna decide their heading is it going to be course on ground heading is it gonna be where the boat is pointing radar overlay maybe a is target's right some cameras but all the big features that are all possible most of us most of the time are not going to be using those features the other thing that's really nice today now is that a lot of the chart plotters come with this Wi-Fi capability onboard and remember Wi-Fi is a local area network meaning you could have Wi-Fi working on the Dark Side of the Moon if you had a Wi-Fi router installed Wi-Fi is used a lot and mistakenly confused with the internet Wi-Fi has nothing to do with the Internet it's just a way to distribute the Internet locally so you could literally be in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and you could have a Wi-Fi network on your boat and that Wi-Fi network would be just to interconnect a bunch of devices on your boat but there would be no internet connectivity okay so that's an important distinction to remember and that's useful here for you know the Pacific Northwest because there are certain places where we go there is no internet even if you had a satellite connection if you go in a place like princess luisa where it's six thousand feet of vertical cliffs there's no satellite connection in princess luisa you're it's a dark it's simply you just can't get it which is good and bad always good and bad and the other thing too is especially for some of us that have older boats like my boat is definitely older when I decided to change my electronics on my boat and I had the simple instrument in my helm I couldn't just assume or I use this expression a lot hope that my single depth instrument at my help was wired in a way to sufficiently now power a radar or chartplotter and AIS at my helm right so when you're actually doing all these upgrades on your boat or contemplating doing these upgrades worried about the fact that the power wires at that helm 20 years ago we're not thinking about powering everything humanly possible that you're now going to be doing at the helm so that means you have to worry you've got to ask yourself is this little tiny gate 18 wire gonna be enough to power all the electronics on my helmet and the likely answer is no and if you choose to ignore that advice then welcome to a world of hurt where your chartplotter works at the dock when you're connected to a battery charger working when you have the alternator running and I get service calls all summer people telling me I'm motoring when my I'm sailing now and my instruments stop working they work at the dock but they don't work while I'm underway sailing and that's because the alternator is not working there's too much voltage drop and the electronics are dying when they need them I mean how scary so trying something when you're chartplotter is powered by a battery charger at the dock right not really of any use because you're using them out there alright so I put the list alphabetically I mean honestly this is where people get sort of really how shall I say that they're very brand loyal sort of like someone that has a BMW might hate a Mercedes or hate someone who has a naughty or hates someone who has a Toyota at the end of the day the players that are left in the market are pretty much real players right there was other brands before but nowadays those are pretty established players yes you can have a preference absolutely most of us do but I would say here that one of them is bad and the other one is great okay they're all offering their there's a piece of the pie and they're all offering a different sort of niche or target audience right because remember what I said none of us are the same they're trying to figure out okay I'm trying to hit as much of the market as possible but they also know that not every every motor is kind of different and they use their boat differently so they're all divine defining and creating products that are trying to capture a portion of the market there is no single chart water that is everything for everyone if you're looking about that sharp water you're going to keep looking you'll never find it that's why there's a chart plotter for everyone all of us but it depends what line within each manufacturer so BMG is for sale motors right it's predominantly designed for sale borders we did a bunch of B and G systems in the fall and right now and yeah it's always going to go on a sailboat you know the software is tailored for that it's part of the Navigo family so Navigo is sort of a big company that owns both Simrad both three simrad B and G and Lawrence Lorentz being fishing B and G being sailing simrad being sort of yachting right so power boats so they've got sort of one big company owns common engineering has three sub brands for different markets it totally makes sense not crazy at all right and that's how if you're going to divide the world in three three different parts fishing sailboating power boating is not a bad look at it furuto is comes back from you see this and we end up doing a lot of runo and generally it's people that really want is sort of that commercials level of reliability you're gonna pay a somewhat a little bit of a premium for it I have motors that choose for who know for the simple fact that they want their boat to look like a ship I mean as you'll see Celine owners north oven owners it's gonna be for runo it's not even an option you can't even have that discussion you know those boats they want to look like a real boat and so real boats in the harbor have Faru know and so they're like the big boats have for uno my big boats got four room and some people just want for uno because that's what they want it's part of what you'd expect on a big trawler furuto makes this product we'll talk a little bit about TZ touch pretty awesome and again maybe not well now it's certainly getting easier to use but very reliable I'd say that's probably the biggest thing would forego its commercial great in the marine recreational market there's nothing that beats for uno for reliably justice is it Garmin super easy to use Garmin a lot of people that have maybe an aviation background really like Garmin I think Garmin's selling feature is definitely usability right and not too feature-rich a little bit maybe like an iphone right not having it too hard to use Lawrence phishing big-time Raymarine it's got a big Suites been around for a long time they've got three big product lines right now on the axiom different sort of products for different users and they're also big a big proponents of sort of an iOS like user experience they've come a long way and they're also owned by a company called FLIR which does the thermal imaging cameras and so they've got really good integration with FLIR cameras and lastly Simrad we've done a bunch of Simrad as well more for yachting not the novice sail boaters and we'll be looking at some of their displays as well they all Simrad and B and G ended up following our a Marines lead of doing displays that are both touchscreen which is nice intuitive and also having everything doable by the side with buttons so you don't have to pick and if you want touchscreen or buttons they'll actually have a device that does both so you can interface everything on the screen or you can interface everything via the buttons so for sale borders especially with wet Helms that's something to consider about like I have some cell borders and only sale you know July and August and if it's raining they're not really going out and they're not in big sea so a touchscreen doesn't matter but if you're going offshore or you're sailing in the middle of the night and you're a racer and you're actually got spray in the cockpit using a touchscreen with wet hands can be a little bit frustrating okay especially also cold hands so this is a four rules got all these big displays and they also have this thing BB means black box MFD means multifunctional display okay meaning it's a portal to multiple things so the good thing to consider is that a lot of these new displays from all manufacturers now have what's called an enemy a mm port at the back this is sort of like a USB okay for computers meaning it's a can bus port and that can bus port which is nmea 2000 allows the integration of multiple things on one display so for example if you have a recently a new outboard or engine you can actually interconnect your engine and show all those gauges and information on the screen you could same thing would do a weather station you could do engine monitoring we converted a hundred footer had old engines and we converted the three generators and the two engines to enemy a 2000 the the gauges stayed the same the analog gauges there's analog gauges in the engine room there's analog gauges upper helm and lower helm we didn't touch those but we digitized all that information and now they can see that information on their Faru no screens and on top of it then they can Wi-Fi in and see those gauges anywhere on the boat so this whole digitization sort of track is possible with any of those displays nowadays enemy in 2000 came out in the late 2000s and it's full full full throttle at this point Raymarine it's got a whole suite this is sort of the accent Pro you'll see that there's actually buttons on the side in the Pacific Northwest where the water is colder and with our hands because it's not always beautiful and sunny outside as we know we're doing a lot of the axiom pros but there's three lines of axioms you can see them Marine Marine has a booth here at the Boat Show and you can see the whole product line of a Marine you'll notice in the middle there showing icons sort of you can press on the icon a little bit like the apps right on an iOS same thing with other phones as well this concept of I want to go see radar I want to go see char plotter I want to see my ass targets right because like I said remember there's a lot of things that are possible on a char plaughter by the end of the day most of us are gonna not do all of it all the time right you're gonna go down to the basics right you're not gonna get out too much while you're navigating you got to look up right look at the horizon scan constantly be on the alert right especially around here for dead heads other boaters paddle boarders fishing boats that do sort of these tracks that you wouldn't expect right because they're not going anywhere they're fishing so you got to be on the lookout so you want to look at your device but you want to kind of pan the horizon and behind you an example of a Garmin when you're doing displays and I wanted to show this image there's multiple ways of obviously mounting displays a lot of them are being flush mounted but nowadays you can even do on a lot of the bigger displays even 16 inches on actually a you bracket right on some boats it makes sense we got to remember like in the 1980s and early 90s nobody was actually creating these huge display mounts they never expected that you'd have these displays that could be mounted they were used to be CRTs there were this deep right so like you think about our Grand Banks things were all mounted on trunnion brackets everything was a you bracket it's only now that the boats are actually coming with flat surface areas where we can actually do a cutout and the displays only maybe an inch fake or two inch or three inch thick in depth right so on a lot of boats we end up still using new brackets because there's no other place there's not a single surface area where I can just do a cut out and put a 16 inch screen in there I'm trying to emphasize here all these different sort of screen sizes that you can buy there's a 7 inch 9 inch 12 inch 16 inch right and you can actually I can tell you this note no joke I've never ever ever heard a boater tell me Jeff I only wish I did a smaller screen you know in hindsight god damn it you know if I could have only done something smaller yeah you know what at that time I wish I did it never happened now I'm not saying you're gonna go from a 7 to a 16 but look at the one size up and what happens is people tell me oh I'm gonna zoom in and zoom out you know what humans are efficient with their energy is another way of saying they're lazy and you're not going to be zooming in zooming out as much as you think you're gonna set it to the scale that you're thinking and you're gonna leave it there and then what you're gonna do is like I got this you're gonna tell yourself I know all of this stuff you I don't need to see around because I've been there because it's too far away you're holding the helm you're it's not comfortable you're like yeah I've been there so it's not the right chart scale but I'm okay and it reminds me of a client of mine who shared that story with me and it was an amazing humbling story and it's there's no point of laughing because it's a lesson for all of us this owner had sail around the world twice 12 years and guess where he he literally hit a rock coming back from Stanley Park from watching the fireworks one night had done the route hundreds of times but was overly confident right and that's this that's the risk when we're boaters is to be overly confident and if you've got a chart plotter that you're zooming in zooming out all the time because it displays too small you're gonna be ended up not and then you want to start panning right because you're not looking at the right scale in the right place you want to look forward and now you're using the d-pad and you're moving forward or you're flickering this sweetie like oh where am I now you got to get back out so if you're considering a nine-inch look at 1/12 because then what I end up doing is I recommend doing two side by side screens chart to chart one zoomed in is one zoomed out and then that way you're looking at the right scale at the right time at the same time very neat so when we're boating on our boat we have a 12 inch screen and we literally have a mode where we're like literally having a 300 range on one and then a point 8 nautical mile on the other so I'm looking right close to everything around my boat and I've got everything sort of far enough away so that I have a perspective a big Simrad screen same night I mean everyone's sort of following the the common sense approach which is the iOS or icons right trying to make it easy to go I want to see radar I want to see a chart plotter okay so what we're going to look at so first of all you can still buy char plotters only and I had that happen a few times where people didn't do their homework bought a chart plotter and then later on it was a great price point amazing price boring like seven thousand five hundred seven hundred and like now I'm ready for radar and they install the radar and they go to plug it in the back and they're like there's no place for the radar port there's no network port and I know that's a sharp flawed or sounder only it's not compatible for a radar right so again think and even though you might not do a radar today if you decide that you're not going to do a radar ever make sure that you look forward enough and say oh I'm not gonna do a radar ever okay but if you're going to do a radar later make sure that your chart plotter has also a radar compatibility so that you can plug in a radar later on we're gonna talk about a little bit the difference between a vector and raster chart I've got two images but in a nutshell what that means is a vector chart is a digitized digitization of a paper-based chart it means that they're actually you can add and remove elements when you zoom in or zoom out there's different information you can make the water red you can make it purple you can do whatever you want all the data is completely you can manipulate it however you want a raster chart is an image you can't really you're not photoshopping the image yours either zooming in zooming out and that's so we'll talk a little bit about that we mentioned screen size how important it is to make a decision now to consider that price point and might not be much more money and here's another take away the horizon for all of us for navigation equipment is honestly minimum 10 years minimum 10 probably 15 maybe 20 that's a long time zone like I have no one that says to me I spent a bunch of money five years ago I'm refreshing my electronics I don't care how much money they've got in their pocket they're spending on something else five year old electronics is brand new electronics no one it's never happened never not a single time ten years is sort of the minimum 15 is average and 20 happens so remember that's a long decision that's a 20 year commitment because there's a lot of money upfront to put it all in so whatever you decide think about it you're not gonna be so like our iPhones or smartphones where we're changing them every couple years every three years or four years this is a 15 year sort of commitment the other thing depending on the type of boat you have you might end up going with a black box a black boxes sort of it's a computer and it sits somewhere else and then you sort of have these monitors like at home and you might have a Hatlen display which obviously is gonna have really good low-light because that night you want to have really low light touchscreen but you might decide to break up and have a black box that does sort of to displace and we talked about the difference between buttons touch and hybrid so here's what a vector chart looks like right it sort of looks cartoonish it was digitized and so there was a literally probably an army of people that were digitizing these paper charts and making raster chart vector charts companies that do that or Navionics and then also Garmin did that right see map did that and Ray Marines even doing it as well in the States they're digitizing sort of what's free information from NOAA or here in Canada CHS and do digitizing this paper-based charts to a vector chart here's what it looks a raster chart I mean I find that beautiful I mean I that could be a frame on a wall I'll uh I'm always gonna love raster it's sort of have that feeling it's common we know what it looks like but it's a paper-based chart and you're just zooming in zooming out so as you're zooming out they can't remove elements you're just seeing further and further away like looking at a chart farther and farther away all right with that we're gonna start on sounder sonars fishfinders different words meanings sort of the same thing besides propulsion steering right two separate things obviously halt integrity is another one halt integrity propulsion steering VHF radio depth sounder it's gotta be top fifth five thing in your boat depth sounder you cannot go boating without one you need to know what the depth is charts don't always tell you the truth that's a reality the soundings might be off they thought it was that they told you it was that but it isn't that so you better it might as well know what it is what's the depth underneath your boat so everyone needs a depth sounder and beyond a depth sounder now you we have transducers that have the ability and will see images that you could actually see literally a ship underwater you can see a tree underwater it's not just showing you depth it's literally imaging the bottom under your boat sweeping to the side sweeping forward there's all these different possibilities with transducers nowadays by the very least you need a depth sounder that shows you bottom depth okay when you're buying a transducer you've got different choices one of them is a through-hole transducer which through-hole and a transom mount off because the transducers are in the water offer you by far the best quality and you can also do what's called an in hull transducer that means it's glued on the inside of the hall but it's like talking through a wall someone on the other side might hear you but there's obviously gonna be a lot of signal loss talking through a solid wall you can't have air gaps so it has to be fiberglass right solid fiberglass and we'll do that sometimes for a boater that says Jeff I've spent up here we were doing my nap but I'm not hauling out until a year later or in eight months let's put in a really inexpensive in Hall transducer short term because it's a couple hundred bucks 150 bucks 250 let's put it in and then next time I haul out then we'll put in the through-hole transducer and we're gonna do it properly I would never ever recommend a through-hole are in Hull transducer as a primary transducer for someone that's going really far afield you know we need depth depth is not a gadget you don't want to lose your bottom your bottom be sort of flaky because remember the water column what's beneath your boat also affects like if you're in a river for example that has a lot of sand or coming out of around a you're in the ocean but for example here we have a large river the Fraser or if you're up north and all these huge rivers that have lots of silt coming out sand that's suspended you're gonna lose your bottom a lot sooner than you would when the bots when the ocean is clear water right so you could actually have a lot of debris suspended in the water column and that's gonna affect the ability of your transducer to read the bottom so they're stronger the transducer if the transducers actually in the water means that you're not gonna have any sort of power loss by going through a hall here's an example of a through hall with a faring block pretty common here's an example of a pretty big transom mount transducer so that's really popular on obviously not sail boats fishing boats power boats up to about probably thirty five ish right but you need an ability to kick it back down so if you don't have a way to sometimes you'll hit a debris and it's gonna pop up you won't know it popped up you're just gonna get a funny reading right so that transducer because there's a lot of debris in the water around here you could actually have it kicked up while you're underway so sometimes you need a way to actually push it back so it's parallel right with the water so straight down you don't want it to be shooting down like this because you're reading it completely do all your reading behind your boat which is not good and that distance is much longer than the distance straight down so Julie you're gonna see those in the twenty thirty foot range thirty is sort of the end maybe you've got a big Grady white we might see that but generally if at one point you might find it an annoyance to actually have to worry about if my transducer constantly parallel so you're gonna say screw it I just want it mounted in the hall always looking down because I'm pretty sure my boat is always level right and so then you end up leaving the transom mount transducer here's an example of an image of a in Hall transducer and it can actually I'll even be mounted for the offset because most of our halls are not flat right so you might have a hall that's like this and so you can actually adjust the degrees to off make for the offset you even now have literally it true Hall transducers that the element your transducer might be installed like this the halls like here but the transducer has a tilted element inside and it's shooting down like here so your transducer is actually you think shooting off to the side but it actually isn't inside the element is actually tilted to offset for your dead rise of your Hall and that's a way to avoid fairing blocks so we do these sort of mushroom transducers that are coming in I don't have an image that are coming in and they're offset by 12 degrees 20 degrees you know air Ameri makes all these different types of offset transducers so you don't have to have a faring block to offset for the dead rise of your Hall now in the past you know you think about these instruments we had simple instruments that would show a depth number right the transducer would be plugged directly into that instrument pretty straightforward and then fishfinders came out and then we need a black box something needed to understand what was going on there need to be a brain to translate all this information and send it to the char plotter so the chart plotter would have something that we humans could understand nowadays you can actually buy a lot of char plotters and have that intelligence right into the chart plotter itself so that means you can connect literally a transducer port directly into the back of the chart plotter multiple multifunction display and have the device translate all that information and show you a sounding image with bottom profile and fish now some of you might have a char plotter that doesn't have that capability it wasn't bought with it right Garmin sells char plotters with transducer ports and with it without but now you're saying oh now I want a depth sounder I want a fish finder well then what you're going to end up doing is you're going to end up buying a black box sounder to be network to your charcoal otter so you can always do it later okay here's the sort of simple instrument showing depth even on big boats we do this all the time on trawlers I'll have a huge suite of navigation electronics at the Maine helm and then add the brow I'm gonna start having sort of like get me home electronics things that are simple like a GPS depth you know like some redundancy you know because you can always go home if you've got a you know a GPS and a depth sounder it's nice to have sharp plotters and all but if something ever goes r-ray you want to get home you have redundancy even though my sailboat I've got a chart plotter and I have a fish finder but I also have another breaker on my panel that just lights up my instruments and my instruments are wind and depth and I leave that on 24/7 even an anchor I want to know what the wind speed is and I our alarm for wind speed because you're in joined-up dragging at high wind speed and I want to know what my depth is because I've always worried about hitting bottom that's something I never stop worrying about I'm constantly because you're swinging in an anchorage right you never know what the bottom could be like and I'm constantly looking at my depth like I'm obsessed and I do that throughout the day with my dad what's my depth did I give my enough room for the tide some places like here the tides are pretty huge 12 15 foot tides are not uncommon further north 25 foot tides I mean those are extreme some places only 2 3 feet right in the Caribbean but here in the Pacific Northwest a 10-foot tide 12 foot tide pretty commonplace some days it's 18 feet times right so you can have a lot of water when you came in but six hours from now it could be 18 feet lower so having a depth sounder as a backup somewhere or something that you leave on all the time depending on what type of boating you do if you're at the dock you won't have to worry as much dr. dock to dock is easy right but if you're anchoring a depth sounder and always on is nice to consider this is a traditional sounder that means 50 and 250 goes deeper 200 is wider so you imagine a cone right coming from an element it's sort of like a cone goes in all directions 50 allows you to go deeper and 200 allows you to see wider chirp that's compressed high-intensity irradiated pulse I mean forget about the name you just chirp at the end of the day a lot of boaters are going with chirp because not only they're able to see it's sort of like a sweeping beam of frequencies right so it doesn't just output one frequency it does a sweep and it's constantly going through that sweep so they're looking for multiple sort of echoes so that's where you can start literally seeing a tree like they have these cool pictures of places where they filled up a reservoir or a dam they dammed an area you can see a bridge house that got you know literally flooded you can see trees that were again flooded you can see all of that on the side of your boat so that's kind of the side view right and then you can also see some of them are forward-looking now so it's a little bit like having radar it's a be able to see underneath your boat and it's really popular obviously with the fishing crowds right or I have forward-looking people are going really further ashore outside of Vancouver Island Queen Charlotte's Alaska and they're going in sort of sketchy Anchorage's right and that's sort of their thrill right they could do the easy one but they want to get in the one that it's hard to get into and so they'll install a forward scan transducer right and they'll even do side sweeps to figure out where are the ledges around their boat when they're anchoring right so they can see that it gets shallower because sometimes it might be 40 feet underneath your boat here but 20 feet to the side it's only 10 feet all right it's not a rock it's just a ledge so that's why some of these different types of transducers are useful not only for fish finding but also for gun coaling right going away from the bead and track and that's where that's the pleasure I find as a boater I mean it's easy to go to certain places that are huge holes right tons of boats it'll be 300 both in the summer and it's easy you drop the hook you're done but if you're willing to be a little bit more courageous and go into more technical Anchorage then there's only another boat there or you're the only boat there so if you like you know if you want to be surrounded with a lot of people generally those are the easy Anchorage's languages that are less demanding technically and if you want to be alone the way to be alone is by being willing to take on a little bit more complicated anchoring locations and that or deeper water or whatnot and you can be in a amazing place and there's 300 boats a nautical mile away and you're by yourself so close you didn't go far but you're just willing to take on a harder Anchorage ok so the next thing we're going to talk about is why radar as a boater I can tell you that I have never left the dock with fog that's never happened I've never intentionally said I can't see further than the bow of my boat let's go boating never done that some people do I'm not laughing some people don't care I've never done that but I can tell you as a boater I've been countless times enveloped surrounded by fog that was not predicted to be foggy and I saw a fog bank of the horizon later when you're underway I'm a sailboat I can't outrun it I'm not doing 40 knots and literally you can see it under horizon and it's coming and you see it it's a white wall and you're like it's coming and sure enough it happened underway in the summer month in August it's not supposed to be foggy there's generally no fog there but sure enough as a boater it's 99 days of bliss and the one day of sheer terror and if you haven't lived the day of sheer terror just wait it will happen and that's why radar is very it's comforting to have because when you're surrounded by fog it's like being sentenced less it means that your hearing is not the same you can't see it just feels that you're without your senses it's terrifying it literally is terrifying what radar gives you is it gives you the ability because you know where you are obviously with your GPS the challenge is the other boats around you right those boats are not on your chart plotter there are not only there if they're transmitting their position via AIS we'll talk about that a little bit later or you're picking them up with your radar so I have motors that say to me well I don't need our radar because when I'm motoring I know where I am because I have my GPS I'm like you're absolutely right if there is thing not a single boat out there you'll get home with a sharp lure only in radar in fog no problem but you're assuming that there's not an idiot out there that's decided to go full throttle like it actually happened to me no joke that fog back that came up full radar everything radar overlay there is a power boat that missed our bow by about 200 we actually use the foghorn full throttle about 35 knots they were screaming Russian roulette style let's see what happens no joke we actually stopped our boat we would have been on a collision course so I'm ARPA acquire them I actually acquired the target they were coming super fast who does 35 knots in fog I mean you got to be you're living in the moment you know life is good now and tomorrow we'll see but right now it's pretty damn good so right now for them they were a happy happy place 35 knots I'm like what the hell is going on who's going 35 in fog target target we're like collision course stop the boat I have time to go down the stairs pull a foghorn I've never used my foghorn before pull out and they pass about 200 feet in front of her about screaming Oh doing 35 knots can you imagine not having my radar it would be crazy you're blind without radar so radar is one of those things where once you live that fog sort of being around you and flopping you you go I need a radar generally you don't need a radar until you do and when that happens you come back you're like yeah so we're doing the radar up great otherwise the missus is never coming out voting again so it's gonna be a couple seasons where she's not gonna be coming because she likes the grandkids and this whole voting thing is pleasure boating not like we've got a good life here right like so we're doing the radar like oh yeah good yeah so consider radar up front rather than after you need it so here's an example of what's amazing about a radar overlay and what makes radar so easy nowadays is that you're literally putting all the radar image on top of your chart right so you're lining up your chart is this and your radar is lining up like that and what that tells you right away is anything that's not on land is something of interest right so it tells you right away what are the things that you don't need to worry about and what are the things you should worry about so anything that's not charted is an object of interest why is that object on the water it's probably a boat is it moving is it a fishing boat practically not moving is it moving off the bottom some fishing boats don't move they're just there mooching off the bottom some fishing boats barely move they're moving a knot fairies are coming in at 20 knots freighters are 25 knots you've got people they've got nothing to live for they're coming at 35 knots okay so you've got all these different boaters out there and as a radar what it does with the overlay it tells you right away what are the targets you should be worried about so radars come in two different sort of flavors one is a radar radio radar so I've got four examples here from Faru no Raymarine BMG Garmin simra it's the same thing like B and G it looks the same so that's sort of an array that is generally about 18 inches this big or 24 inches and there's an Iranian side and it's about this high and you'll see them on radar poles you'll see them on radar towers on massive sailboats right they're not too heavy and yeah probably about 250 feet probably you're going to end up seeing them and the array remember is only NT 8 18 inches and the wider the array right the longer that's why the big ships it's think about it the more they have depth of vision right the wider or eyes are the better your depth perception is if you cover one eye you're your world is not 3d anymore right everything becomes simply 2d there's no depth perception so the bigger the array the better depth perception you're gonna have and then you can start separating targets that would otherwise be seen as one cluster that's why the big boats have really big erase right really really big arrays because they can see things that otherwise would be obstructed in front of another right so that's what a open array looks like they start about this size all right and then they go as big as you want as big as you want 12 feet but you never see that on a pleasure boat but 6 feet array 8 feet array is not uncommon for feet are a definitely not uncommon so when you're thinking about nowadays what's amazing about this new technology there's these sort of solid-state radars so I think one of the challenges that we all had as pleasure voters is that it's hard to understand a radar screen honestly if you don't use it it's pretty hard so one piece of advice that I have for motors is always use radar when you don't need them like I use radar every day that I'm boating and I use it to anchor literally I what's the distance between my boat and other boats what's the distance between my boat and shore I'm using it all the time I want to start estimating distances and I want to know what boats look like when I turn on radar what is it act like what's sort of what am I getting back because remember I'm gonna need it one day when I'm blind when it's either pitch dark outside or I'm again full fog and now what these solid state radars are doing is they're actually doing sort of auto marpa they're actually looking at targets coming towards you and putting them in red and targets that are moving away from you or going in green so they're actually trying to make understanding radar easier now commercial operators only operate a boat with radar that's it there's nothing else charts all I mean it's radar radar radar radar and practice makes perfect if you end up using radar only when that sheer day of Terror and use once every second or third year you're gonna use it but you're not gonna know how to use it so one thing to consider is for sure radar overlay makes it easier modern radars that start acquiring targets automatically color coding the ones that are moving the ones that are moving towards you that are on a collision course and also using it all the time using it every day that you're out boating I use it to look at the ferries look at the freighters I'm like I'm curious have to read our overlay on oh yeah look at that boat oh yeah that's a big that's a pretty big image yeah yeah yeah oh yeah there look at them I light it up in English Bank where there's so many freighters anchored yeah we're all the boats yeah that makes sense that boat that boat that boat when I pass close to one what does it look like when I'm close to a big freighter you know it's one thing when the freighter is that you know a thousand meters a mile away but what happens when the freighters literally 300 foot to your side that's just simply anchored what does that look on the chart with our radar overlay practice or good practice makes perfect all right a is a is stands for automatic identification system and it's a way for boats to boats to trans mate not only their location but also their speed on ground their course on ground which is where they're going how fast they're going somewhere their boat name the width of the boat the length of the boat they can even on Stern transport they'll tell you their destination when they expect to be to port and so you can actually know a big boat over there who are you you know here's me you can actually call the boat they're your Lear Lisi their boat name and say by the way I'm navigating I'm letting you through you know you can start calling someone by their name and saying hey you right because now it's showing up on your chart plotter and you have sort of like a business card an identification card for every boat that is transmitting a is now as a boater you might not be transmitting but you can also be receiving at least you see them they don't see you right it's a first step of having a is is having a receiver only and the next step is being a transponder so you transmit your position and they receive I have motors that say Jeff on Friday I'd rather my transmitter not be transmitting I don't want people in my office my staff to know that I'm voting can I be on silent mode I'm like absolutely you can go silent on Friday Saturday suddenly you're gonna show up at an anchorage but on friday you were nowhere to be seen so yes you can go silent the other thing too is I have voters that have maybe both partners they're you know two partners three partners four partners on a boat and they they're meeting they're exchanging the boat in different places but sometimes you can't communicate with the boat partner are they on their way are they making progress you can actually go on a phone have an app literally look at the any boat in the world and see them on your phone and they could be in the Browns and like well I haven't been able to reach Mike but yeah he's underway and he's going to port and everything's on schedule or your partner might be looking and simply your wife or her husband's you might be looking to say I wonder if they made it to anchor last night yeah I didn't hear from them but I wonder did they make it to anchor they forgot to call me I haven't spoken to them you can literally look on your app see they're like yeah they're anchored and such and such Bay they told me they were wrong they're things must be pretty good if they're anchored and they're in where they intend it to be so it's a way for boaters to stay in touch you might be looking for a friend we're going up to desolation sound where are they oh yeah they're in Monte they're in I don't know a preeto Haven oh they're in Cortes bank okay perfect Oh we'll reach out to channel maybe 66 when we get closer again if you want to go silent you can no problem but if you want to share your information with other voters you can do that as well now it's obviously vessel to vessel and vessel to shore that's how the shore gets the information and then they upload it via the internet and then you download via the internet it's not real time so I don't recommend people to navigate a is with a phone this is not a navigation tool it's there's a delay there okay it's imagine you walking around and having your site telling you information around you 10 15 20 seconds later there'd be a lot of bumping into people if the delay there was a 10 seconds or even five second delay between what you see and what you're processing you cannot make any sort of navigation decisions without having instantaneous information of where boats are and where boats are going here's an example of the boat right here and then you see an AIS target right over here there show up as a triangle you got another triangle over here another triangle over here another triangle over here and so they're trying to avoid each other right now right they're coming in sort of a congested navigable waterway and you'll see that a lot like around here in the Pacific we've got a lot of boats happening in the Strait of Georgia there's boats that are going to English Harbor they're anchoring they're supposed to are leaving you can actually light up at Rene is far away from even under like I know you could be 5 miles 10 miles 20 miles and you'll have all those a is target's show up on your chart plotter which is really nice to figure out sometimes there's places around here where we have really tighten passes and you'll see big bolts on the other side I would remember just recently we were coming through a pass and I was telling my partner we've gotta wait there's two tugboats on the other side it's their turn and sure enough we stopped and we could have gone through that pass it's called dogs narrows but it's a really tight pass you can't see the other side sure enough I waited I looked like crazy why am i waiting but they came in with their log booms one two and then we took our turn and then we went through the pass so those are basically some of the you can see local commercial traffic you can plan narrow passages under bridge right constriction of areas because here in the Pacific Northwest there's a lot of that and you can have collision alerts and with that I think it's going to be my last slide so here's a big takeaway when you buy an A is you can buy them as a receiver and you can buy it as transponder and receiver if you buy an AIS transponder it's going to come with a GPS why because everything needs to be time-stamped they need to know that you are where you are when you are so every single AIS transponder doesn't matter if it's M track Vesper could be for uno to be Simrad it could be Raymarine could be Garmin all come with their own dedicated GPS antenna so that everything is time-stamped so they know where you are when you say you are okay we've got a couple minutes just for questions before we go on to the next presentation anybody here have questions on navigation equipment or what we talked about yes yeah so the question upfront was dedicated VHF antenna or AIS antenna or a splitter it really depends because as a sail border the advantages you have tall masts so a sail border would generally go with a splitter because about range if you've got a big powerboat and you could put an intent on portside and for reasons of symmetry you've got room on the starboard side you might end up putting an AIS antenna on starboard and a VHF antenna on port but some big power boats already have a VHF for lower helm and a VHF for upper helm on Rd port and starboard so that's where you might end up doing a splitter and there an active splitter digital splitters so there's no real like line loss it depends there's no easy way of ideally dedicated antenna ideally if you had a boat with two masts at opposite ends of the boat not in the same plane you'd have two antennas but then the problem is are you do you have the ability or the time to route a second antenna right and how many boats have two masks not in the same level separated away from each other not that many yes another question yeah so good question how do you end up inputting VIS information about the boat named MMSI the width of your boat the length of your boat all that has to be done either through an app literally like vesper for example you actually go in via an app that you download from the internet log in via blue - I Phi and then you do that or you'll do it through a computer okay with that I'm going to let I'm upstairs at the booth there of the whole weekend so if you've got more questions about electronics you can meet me up there and also at the end of the next presentation anybody's got questions I'll take questions as well so thank you everyone for being here today I appreciate it

Channel: Pacific Yacht Systems

Views: 20,093

Rating: 4.9087453 out of 5

Keywords: pacific yacht systems, jeff cote, marine electronics, boat electronics, garmin, furuno, AIS, chartplotter, Depth Sounder, B&G, Raymarine, camera for my boat, marine camera, camera on board, boat stereo, VHF, Simrad, radar, sounder, autopilot, marine autopilot, boat autopilot, boat electrical, boat show, marine navigation, boat navigation system, navigation gear for my boat

Id: LmzseUPB15s

Length: 59min 28sec (3568 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 28 2020