…Ok so, Dena went to the Big Sky Place (Montana), about the time our new Simrad NSS 7 multifunction display (MFD) with 3-G broadband radar showed up… That thing is fucking cool!
Without going into too much technical nomenclature I’d just like to say, I think this box makes the Garmin 740s look like a Fisher-Price toy. The way it’s built just demands a certain level of respect and it is so easy to read and comprehend, out-of-the-frack’n-box, that an end user such as myself can flush-mount it in 45 minutes and program it for cruising in seconds after that.
It’s a GPS chart plotting system, meaning it will follow our position using the built in GPS receiver and apply that position to a pre-loaded chart of the near coastal United States and Canada.
It is also a display for a 3-G Broadband Radar… Don’t get me started on that, just read this (dead link). Now that, that was work!
Dena got off the plane from Montana and went up the mast on the first day to install the radar mount (pictured) and the radome.
We hauled the dome up in a sail-bag and she unwrapped it right there on the mount, like this.
…In the bag, but not attached to the boat in any way.
…And bolted down.
After that we ran all the cable through the boat and wired it up to the MFD down below.
Then it was my turn.
I drilled all the holes and riveted the cable ties to the mast and we turned it on…
In less than a second it swept the entire Baltimore inner harbor and gave us a perfect image of all the on-the-water vessel traffic in the downtown basin. It really does work that well!
That looks sweet. Ya gotta love technology (sometimes) when it works. This not only tells you where everyone is , it tells them “hey asshole I’m here too”. Looks like you guy’s have worked your ass off to make it safe and completely reliable to go across the pond. I’ll check in soon.Aloha my friend.
Thanks Tom,
We’ve been playing around with the idea of getting a chart-plotting computer ever sense our 20 day off shore adventure across the Pacific Ocean with our laptop charts dieing every other day… We proved then we didn’t need fancy toys to navigate our way around the globe… But it sure is sweet having a constant position displayed in front of me that only draws 1.6 amps of 12 volts DC!
We’ve had radar on board for the last 10 years, we wouldn’t go off shore without it. As a matter of fact radar has saved our lives in big seas, fog and busy shipping lanes so many times that it felt weird not having one on on this boat for as long as we did.