We were going to need a ship’s computer anyway. Plus, we wanted a permanent ship’s entertainment system with all our collection of photos, music and video on a Synology NAS hard drive system. At the very least, we knew that we wanted to have a pretty big and complex Maretron monitoring system on the boat, and we would need to run N2K View software. You cannot install any other software on them. Some interact with the boat’s stereo system, can switch to internet browsing, and even take control of the boat’s drones! They are amazing, but essentially, they are closed black boxes that need to get sent back to the manufacturer for repairs.Īs versatile as today’s MFD’s are, there is still much they cannot do. Today’s multifunction chart plotters show radar, AIS targets, depth, fish finder graphs, sonar, and night vision cameras. Each time, it was rip out the old and stick in new hardware. Then he upgraded again many miles later when that plotter failed. He had fitted that boat out 15 years before, upgrading the original electronics. When I met Wayne, he had a single Raymarine E7 chart plotter on Learnativity, the boat we sold before starting this project. Multifunction display chart plotters, or MFD’s have become the standard on most recreational boats. Today, I’m going to start with our decision to go all-in on PCs. Over the next few weeks and months, I hope to write several blog posts covering my journey of learning and decisions we have made about our various networks, from NMEA 2000 to ethernet, to our Victron smart management system of our batteries, chargers and solar panels. But, hey, I find it really exciting to learn new stuff, and that’s a huge part of what this building Möbius is all about for us. So I dove in to the deep end of the research pool and quickly found myself over my head. Gee, that the job I could most likely help out with was in the area of electronics and networking. So it just seemed right when Wayne was finding himself a bit overwhelmed with the work of ordering equipment and overseeing the build, and not finding enough time to work on our beloved Mr. While I’m really glad I got the opportunity to experience those early days of cruising, I have never longed to go back to the “good old days.” Rather, most of my life I have been an early adopter of technology, from Loran to Sat-Nav, to GPS, to computer navigation, to iPads and navigation apps. No radio, no refrigeration, and for entertainment, we usually read books by the light of a Coleman lantern. The only pieces of electronics gear on that 44-foot sailboat were a Heathkit home-built digital depth sounder and a battery-operated multi-band short wave receiver. We navigated with a sextant and a chronometer that we kept in a velvet-lined box. This is a much younger me in Nuku Hiva in the Marquesas. The first time I sailed across the Pacific was in 1975.
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