RELiON Battery, which makes lithium batteries, has launched the RB36V40. It’s a 36-volt, 40 amp-hour marine lithium battery that the company says weighs 70 percent less than the lead-acid equivalent.

According to the manufacturer, the RB36V40’s maximum capacity is 20 percent more than its series equivalent. The battery can be installed with a parallel setup for quicker, easier charging.

The battery is also built for the marine environment, with an IP67-rated case to repel dust and resist water ingress for up to 30 minutes submerged at about 3 feet. A glue channel and screw-latched enclosure are intended to protect against airborne contaminants, and there’s an internal battery-management system to protect against short circuits and overcharging.

Who owns RELiON Battery? It’s part of Navico Group, which is a division of Brunswick Corp.

Take the next step: go to relionbattery.com

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Brunswick Corp. says it saw record-breaking sales for some of its brands at the Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show.

According to the company, Sea Ray reported a 33 percent increase in revenue compared to the 2021 show and a 17 percent increase in overall units from last year; Boston Whaler and Bayliner also had strong sales, as Whaler displayed a recyclable fiberglass boat; Mercury Marine accounted for more than half of all outboard engines at the show; and Navico Group saw a 20 percent increase in electronics market share during the show.

“Fort Lauderdale is the unofficial kickoff to the U.S. fall boat show calendar and serves as a barometer for our brands to gauge dealer sentiment, consumer interest and product trends,” Dave Foulkes, Brunswick Corporation CEO, stated in a press release.

What boats and products made their debuts from the Brunswick Corp. family of brands? The Sea Ray 260 outboard, Boston Whaler 280 Dauntless, and Simrad HALO 2000 and 3000 radars.

Where to learn more: visit brunswick.com

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Navico Group, part of Brunswick Corp., recently unveiled two new technologies: the Fathom e-Power System and CZone Mobile.

The Fathom e-Power System is intended to provide reliable power management and control, and let users better understand and manage their power needs. It combines components from Navico Group brands, including Mastervolt, BEP, CZone, Ancor and Blue Sea Systems.

Fathom e-Power provides more battery capacity and eliminates the noise, vibration and fumes associated with traditional generators. It has an intuitive user interface for monitoring and controlling power on and off the vessel. The system is available in 12-, 24- and 84-volt customizable kits, with additional kits expected in 2023.

CZone Mobile is a cloud and mobile app technology to help boatbuilders enhance the boating experience for their customers. It can monitor a boat’s location, engine data, battery and fuel levels, and bilge status. It also can provide content such as marine weather forecasts and trip tracking.

Several boat brands, including Boston Whaler and Sea Ray, are already using CZone Mobile.

What’s Navico Group? It’s a newly formed division of Brunswick Corp. for integrated systems and products in the marine and RV markets. The group’s brands include Attwood, B&G, BEP, Blue Sea Systems, C-Map, CZone, Garelick, Lenco, Lowrance, Marinco, Mastervolt, MotorGuide, Progressive Industries, ProMariner, RELiON, Simrad and Whale.

Where to learn more: go to navico.com

The post Navico Unveils Fathom e-Power and CZone Mobile appeared first on Yachting.

The year was 2015. I was with Dave Dunn, Garmin’s senior director of marine sales, aboard Capt. Mike Flowers’ SeaHunter 24 Ruff-n-Uff, slowly approaching Miami’s MacArthur Causeway. Flowers tapped his Garmin multifunction display, and it presented imagery from the Garmin Panoptix PS31 forward-looking sonar.

Dunn cast a lure and, moments later, a tarpon appeared. A dance unfurled, and the target wisely dodged a root canal.

Watching this episode on screen, I was gobsmacked by Panoptix’s LiveVu and RealVu perspectives, which combined information from the forward-looking transducer, multibeam sonar and phased-array technology to produce live, video-type imagery.

Mostly, I was amazed that ceramic bits could yield this kind of water-column awareness.

Darrell Lowrance helped introduce this technology to boaters in 1957 with his Fish-Lo-K-Tor, which provided depth information and detected objects in the water column. Products available today have far better capabilities and onscreen imagery than equipment from just a decade ago.

“Transducers are the key part of the fish finder’s performance: The frequency and power rating of the ceramic determines depth capabilities, coverage under the boat and the ability to see fish in the water column,” says Craig Cushman, Airmar Technology Corp.’s director of marketing. Transducers, he adds, rely on precision timing, much like radars. “The transducer sends acoustic energy throughout the water column and then listens for returning signals. The fish finder then interprets the echo to display what is below the boat.”

Like radars, transducers spend roughly 1 percent of their time transmitting and 99 percent listening for echoes. Transducers are seldom seen, but they take high-voltage electrical pulses (from their networked fish finder, multifunction display or sonar) and convert them to outgoing sound waves that propagate downward and outward in a cone-type shape. Today’s transducers are sensitive enough to discern echoes that are just a few hundredths of a single volt.

Transducers are built like nesting dolls but with piezoceramic elements at their cores. These ceramic elements are made from polarized barium titanate or lead zirconate titanate, look like metal, and can be fabricated into shapes of various complexity. A basic ceramic element might be shaped like a hockey puck, while a more sophisticated element might be formed into a bar, oval, ring or tube.

These ceramic elements are separated from the water on one side by an “acoustic window,” while the rest of the element is encased in a sound-absorbing material that helps direct the sound waves out of, and back through, the acoustically neutral window. The encapsulating material (typically urethane or epoxy) is then encased in the physical housing (usually bronze, molded plastic, stainless steel or urethane). Depending on the transducer, miniaturized printed circuit boards are sometimes embedded in the encapsulating layer that allows the fish finder to automatically adapt to the connected transducer. A pipestem houses electrically shielded cables that run from the yacht’s fish finder or multifunction display to the PCBs and elements.

“The ceramics inside can dramatically change the cost of a transducer,” says Jim McGowan, Raymarine’s Americas marketing manager.

Some entry-level transducers might employ a single piezoceramic element, while high-end transducers might involve 16 to 18 elements. Transducers can be manufactured to “resonate” at a specific frequency (say, 50 kHz), dual frequencies (50/200 kHz) or over a sweep of frequencies.

“You can only play so many songs with two keys on the piano,” Dunn says, adding that chirp transducers transmit over a sweep of frequencies, like having a music scale’s worth of notes, but in this case with better target separation and resolution as the result.

According to McGowan, a single-frequency transducer sounds like a ticking watch. “Chirp would sound like a police siren, increasing in pitch,” he says. “The first returns are the first transmissions, so the system has a reference, allowing it to overlap the original pulse with the echo, giving [onscreen] detail.”

Multibeam sonar systems typically employ an array of ceramic elements. These elements can be electronically steered by the transducer’s controlling microprocessors to ring at specific or sequenced times to scan the seafloor, or they can all ring simultaneously. Today’s multibeam and ultrawide-beam systems can also yield high-resolution information about what’s on each side of the keel (sometimes called side-scanning sonar) or, as Dunn and I saw in 2015, forward-looking imagery.

While McGowan says the sport-fishing crowd drives transducer development, the computer-electronics market enables innovation. “We have the advantage of components,” says Cushman, pointing to today’s dime-size PCBs. They’ve “become smaller and cheaper, which lets us put different things inside.”

As with all markets, there are high-end, mid-level and entry-level transducers. When it comes to the high end of the market, Airmar is the undisputed leader. While most of the bigger marine-electronics manufacturers make transducers in-house, they typically build less-complex, high-volume sounders—or, in some cases, highly specialized, high-end transducers (for example, Garmin builds its Panoptix transducers).

According to Cushman, Airmar manufactures roughly 80 to 90 percent of all transducers that operate on at least 600 watts of transmitting power. Airmar-built transducers are sometimes sold with an Airmar badge; other times, they carry third-party branding.

This relationship frees the Big Four (Furuno, Garmin, Navico and Raymarine) to innovate new fish-finding and sonar technologies and specifications, rather than developing transducers, and it allows Airmar to amass the capability and expertise to manufacture at scale and to high industrial standards.

Customers can order Airmar-built transducers that ship with plug-and-play cable connections, and owners can often use existing transducers with other third-party fish finders or multifunction displays. Airmar’s distribution company, Gemeco Marine Accessories, can help customers determine if an existing transducer will work with other equipment. If an existing transducer is compatible, Gemeco can provide the wiring diagram and splice kit to rewire it for use with a new fish finder. Changing out through-hull transducers, however, requires a haulout and a plan.

“Know what you want to do with the system,” McGowan says. “Transducers are fundamental to the performance of the system, and you get what you pay for.”

After all, without good acoustics, how else will you be able to spin a credible onscreen yarn about a big one that got away?

Fitting Considerations

Transducers can be hung from a transom-mounted bracket, or they can be in-hull or through-hull mounted. While each setup has its advantages, through-hulls are best for power cruising and sport fishing yachts. “Airmar has certified installers who have been trained on the best installation practices,” says Airmar’s Craig Cushman.

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July 2019: A pick-and-place machine delicately but quickly tattoos microchips onto printed circuit boards at Navico’s production facility in Ensenada, Mexico. The machine looks like a miniaturized rotary cannon, with a mission to complete upward of 10,000 boards per day for B&G, Lowrance and Simrad products.

Standing there, I couldn’t discern what brand of equipment each batch of boards was destined for. While this reflects the integral role the boards play in marine electronics, it also reflects how deeply integrated these previously independent brands have become since they merged under a single roof.

October 2021: Brunswick Corp. announces that it has completed the acquisition of Navico in a $1.05 billion deal—rolling B&G, Lowrance and Simrad into Brunswick’s Advanced Systems Group.

It’s yet another new day for these brands—and for the whole marine-electronics landscape. While B&G, Lowrance and Simrad have all previously experienced acquisitions and reorganizations, Brunswick’s acquisition is poised to usher in a new era of integration among marine electronics, systems and yachts while allowing the brands to continue evolving under their existing leadership.

Brunswick consists of more than 60 brands that conduct business in four market segments. The company, which was founded in 1845 to build billiard tables, has been steadily increasing its marine interests since 1960. Brunswick’s other acquisitions include Bayliner, Boston Whaler and Sea Ray, and its portfolio includes Mastervolt, CZone, C-Map, Protector and Mercury’s four propulsion brands.

The addition of Navico “was a strategic acquisition for Brunswick to support their ACES strategy, which is really the future of a truly integrated boat system,” says Knut Frostad, Navico’s CEO, referring to Brunswick’s plan for autonomy, connectivity, electrification and shared access. “It helps Brunswick evolve that strategy and was the missing piece in the puzzle to offer an integrated, bow-to-stern solution.”

The acquisition also brings the Navico brands closer to their marine-industry roots. “We’ve obviously been owned in the past by financial investors, who have a different objective,” says Frostad, an accomplished sailor who served on Navico’s board for 14 years before being named CEO in 2019. “Now we’re owned by someone really strategic who understands the business.”

Brunswick’s investment in Navico goes much deeper than shared cultures, he adds.

“Electronics is obviously having more and more tentacles around the boat and is integrating with more elements of the boat,” Frostad says. “We have the opportunity to offer an integrated solution—much quicker and much better—because now we’re under the same roof with companies that offer these products on the same boats.”

The sailing-focused B&G brand may initially seem like a strange bedfellow in a corporation with a predominantly power-focused portfolio; however, Frostad says Brunswick sees sailing as a growth area.

“We’re using B&G today to develop some very interesting technologies that can be used in other parts of the marine industry, such as autopilots, where [competitive] sailing is very, very advanced compared to powerboats,” he says.

Smart autonomous or semi-autonomous vessels may be coming in the future. But for now, B&G, Lowrance and Simrad brand identities will remain, and Navico-branded equipment will be spec’d on Brunswick-built boats if Navico offers the best technical solution. Otherwise, Brunswick-owned boatbuilders are free to spec third-party equipment.

One example of third-party partnerships is DockSense (see Yachting, June 2019), a collaboration among Raymarine, Boston Whaler and Mercury that delivered the world’s first integrated smart docking-assist product.

Frostad envisions a similar future for Navico. “It’s really about coming up with an offering that’s outstanding in the industry, that’s the right offering and the right product and the right services at the right time,” he says.

In addition to harboring shared aspirations for creating connected vessels, Brunswick and Navico share other core values too. “I’ve taken Navico on a sustainability journey that’s very ambitious and that goes very deep into what sustainable boating is in the future,” Frostad says. “Brunswick has really mirrored that strategy. … Now we have multiple touch points for the same customers. That enables us to have a bigger footprint on the boat, but we can also collaborate on offering a better service.”

Moving forward, B&G, Lowrance and Simrad customers can expect further integration of their electronics and the rest of their yacht in ways that are intended to make boating better, safer and more sustainable. Much like the factory-line integration that I witnessed in Ensenada, in time, boaters aren’t likely to know exactly where their equipment’s innovations stem from, only that these advances enhance the boating experience.

A Company is Born

The histories are rich: In 1947, Willy Christian Simonsen founded Simonsen Radio in Oslo, Norway. Simrad Yachting was purchased by the Kongsberg Group in 1996; in 2003, Simrad Yachting acquired B&G, the sailing-instrument manufacturer. In 2003, the Kongsberg Group sold Simrad Yachting to Altor Equity Partners, a Swedish private-equity firm. In 2005, Altor purchased Lowrance, a Tulsa, Oklahoma-based firm. Navico was created in 2006 when Altor merged the three.

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In Dr. No, the 1962 film based on Ian Fleming’s sixth novel about British spy James Bond, actor Desmond Llewelyn made the British secret-service armorer code-named “Q” famous. Q maintained the airs of a refined British butler while furnishing Agent 007 with innovative, stealthy and game-saving gadgets and weapons. All the bagpipe flamethrowers, cigarette darts and other inventions helped foster expectations for tradecraft devices that stretched the envelope.

If these expectations for constantly improving tech sound a bit like a computer geek’s enthusiasm for the latest operating-system update, you’re en route to understanding the Q Experience’s philosophy toward branded and white-label multifunction displays.

The first multifunction displays arrived in the mid-2000s, offering boaters the ability to control and display cartography and networked instrumentation on a single screen. As the technology matured and onboard networking improved, yachtsmen could soon overlay informational layers atop third-party applications (such as radar over cartography), control third-party instruments (including thermal-imaging cameras), collect and share bathymetric data, and in some cases, stream Netflix or control third-party drones.

Today’s marine marketplace has four established MFD manufacturers—Garmin, Furuno, Navico (parent company of Simrad and Lowrance) and Raymarine. The Q Experience, which draws its name from the Bond films, aspires to add its name to the list with from-the-ground-up hardware and a bespoke operating system that delivers integration, an automotive-style user interface, built-in entertainment, an anti-theft alarm, constant connectivity and a dedicated app.

Niklas Öhman and Johan Wessberg founded the Q Experience in Finland in 2015 following a conversation with a major European boatbuilder. The conversation unexpectedly veered toward MFDs, and the boatbuilders pondered how chart plotters might be done differently. Further conversations ensued, and Öhman and Wessberg agreed to create and build a ground-up MFD.

The result was the Q Display 1 series (Q1), which had a Linux-based operating system and was available in two screen sizes. Other features included two CAN buses, NMEA 2000 compatibility, radio, Bluetooth connectivity and a Wi-Fi hotspot.

“Our user interface’s logic is a mix between Apple’s iOS and Android. It shouldn’t take more than three screen taps to access any application,” says Öhman.

One small but telling example of the Q Experience’s smart user interface is the MFD’s menu page, says Patrik Gustafsson, the company’s product and sales manager. “If there’s no networked fish finder, you won’t see [one listed] in the menu,” he says.

Like other marine-electronics manufacturers, the Q Experience team uses automatic, over-the-air updates for software and operating systems. What’s different is the nature of the Q Experience’s updates. “Every year, [our customers] get a new plotter,” says Öhman, adding that the company releases updates during shoulder seasons, not midsummer. “If you look at our [user interface] from 2016 and now, they’re totally different.”

The Q Experience released its second-generation Q Display 2 series (Q2) in November 2020. It’s available in three screen sizes (10-inch, 16-inch and the double-wide 2-by-10-inch) and builds on the Q1’s capabilities. For example, while the Q2 has Q Experience software, N2K compatibility and optically bonded IPS screens, it also has a cleaner, more customizable user interface; faster (and dedicated) data and graphics processors; a more accurate GPS; two Ethernet ports; Navionics cartography; a built-in cellular modem; and a built-in amplifier for streaming music.

Q2 displays also use Q Experience’s mobile app, letting users monitor battery, bilge and fuel levels, receive warning messages from the boat, interact with the system’s built-in Q Boat Guard anti-theft alarm, and use an embedded N2K switch to control onboard systems via a mobile device. Q2 displays are always on, connected and gathering big data to share with the Q Experience and its partners, who refine the user experience.

Q2s are designed to operate much like automotive infotainment systems. “Navigation has to be easy, like in cars,” Gustafsson says, citing features such as the MFD’s dashboard, digital gauges and integrated (and customizable) widgets.

The Q2’s N2K switch gives users control of up to 20 networked devices; however, owners can add blocks (increments of 20), allowing operators to control more of their vessel using the Q mobile app. “We haven’t integrated with CZone or EmpirBus” digital-switching systems, he says. “We’ll keep our own switch for now.”

The Q mobile app also delivers vessel security via the Q2’s geofence-based Q Boat Guard anti-theft alarm, alerting owners if a boat escapes its slip. The system also allows users to watch their boat’s real-time use and share trip details with social media platforms.

The Q Experience has always sold Q1 displays as Q-branded products to consumers—or as OEM-level equipment to boatbuilders—and is following this same branded/white-label model with the Q2. “You don’t know the manufacturer of the display in [a] car because it’s a white-label product,” Öhman says. “We focus on branding [for] the boat’s manufacturer.”

The Q Experience has gained market interest, especially among Northern European boatbuilders. “In the Nordic countries, we have 35 to 40 percent of the [market] share of new boats,” Gustafsson says. “The volume is in powerboats, but I have one on my sailboat.”

While this is good news for the Q Experience, headwinds still exist for US customers. The Q2 employs an embedded cellular modem, which necessitates approval by the Federal Communications Commission. That approval is reportedly forthcoming, after which the Q Experience will need to establish US sales and support teams.

Still, if you like the idea of a Euro-built MFD that’s different from the other tech on your dock, check out the Q Experience. The eye-pleasing system might lack bagpipe flamethrowers and cigarette darts, but it includes the promise of a constantly evolving operating system and an ever-smoother user interface.  

The post The Q Experience Enters MFD Market appeared first on Yachting.

It’s a quest as old as time: heading to sea to forage dinner. Early mariners were limited by the wind’s direction and their simple sail plans, a limitation that internal-combustion engines fixed, but the basic problem remained. Namely, where to go to catch dinner or land prized pelagic species.

High-powered radar came next, allowing mariners to see where birds were congregating, but radar range is limited by physics and the Earth’s curvature, and constantly repositioning boats costs money and time. Now, SiriusXM Marine’s Fish Mapping service yields information on a scale that radar can’t touch, and its satellite-communications receivers deliver it in an intuitive and graphically rich format.

SiriusXM built a name for itself among boaters around 2005 with its Marine weather services. In 2019, SiriusXM unveiled its Fish Mapping service, which provides detailed information about where anglers are most likely to find fish. While Fish Mapping has been available since then to owners with compatible Garmin multifunction displays, Furuno and Navico (Simrad) recently released software updates that allow Fish Mapping’s graphical data layers to be displayed on their compatible screens, using dedicated satellite antennas and receivers (see sidebar).

“Fish Mapping includes eight data layers that are compiled to better put you on the bait,” says Dan Dickerson, SiriusXM’s director of marine and aviation services. These layers are built using water-temperature data that’s gathered by the Weather Channel (SiriusXM’s parent company); this information is sent to Maxar Technologies, which compiles it with data that’s collected by their own satellites. “Maxar puts [Fish Mapping] in a finished product,” Dickerson adds. “We’re just the delivery guys.”

To access Fish Mapping, anglers need to sign up for the month-to-month subscription service ($100 per month, which includes all of SiriusXM’s Marine Offshore weather features). The subscription can be winterized during the off season. Information is transmitted to the yacht’s antenna and receiver, which shares it via Ethernet with all networked displays.

Fish Mapping’s eight data layers are: weed lines (concentrations of buoyant algae and plants), sea-surface height anomalies (areas where the sea’s surface is higher due to eddies, fronts, downwelling and upwelling), sea-surface temperature contours (contour lines that graphically depict different sea-surface temperatures), sea-surface temperature front strengths (the estimated strengths of ocean fronts), 30-meter subsurface sea temperatures (water temperatures around 100 feet below the surface), contours of plankton concentration (areas plentiful in plankton), plankton-front strengths (pairs plankton-rich areas with areas lacking plankton), and fishing recommendations (estimates for where anglers are likely to find specific species).

Each layer is displayed atop a user’s selected cartography, with the exception of fishing recommendations, which is overlaid atop cartography and any of the other seven available data layers. Only one Fish Mapping layer selection can be displayed at once (read: no quad-screen views that depict four different selections at once).

While this is a lot ofcomplex information, it’s presented in a clean and graphically engaging way with a single purpose.

Anglers “can save time and fuel by letting the technology point them to where the fish [might] be,” says Dave Dunn, Garmin’s senior director of marine sales.

While each marine-electronics manufacturers’ hardware and operating systems differ, the information is exactly the same. “There are subtle differences in the user interface, but the data is the data,” Dickerson says. These differences mainly involve each manufacturer’s choice of displayed color palettes.

As with all time-sensitive data, expiration dates matter, and SiriusXM updates Fish Mapping layers regularly. “Sea-surface temperature contours are updated every three hours, while everything else is updated daily,” Dickerson says, adding that fishing recommendations are updated Tuesday and Friday mornings (Eastern Standard Time).

While fishing recommendations are low-hanging fruit, the biweekly update rate encourages users to parse fresher data themselves. “Fishing takes place in areas of predation,” says Tim Moore, Furuno’s East Coast general manager. He suggests that new users start by examining plankton-concentration contours and plankton-front-strength layers. “Where plankton are, fish feed,” he says.

The next steps involve looking for plankton-rich areas that intersect with sea-surface temperature front strengths. “[Anglers] go right to the fishing recommendations,” Dickerson says. “But it’s not that simple. I’m cautious about the recommendations. Plankton fronts and temperature fronts are my favorites. When they overlap, it’s Christmas.”

Moore agrees: “If you’re willing to put in the time to learn all the features of Fish Mapping, you’re going to be a better fisherman.”

Users can overlay each of the eight data layers atop their choice of cartography, which ensures a familiar feel. “Fish Mapping makes it easy for anglers to see where their boat is located in relation to [their] desired fishing locations,” says Stephen Thomas, Simrad’s product director.

In addition to finding fish, the service helps anglers save fuel and time. “When we leave the dock, [anglers] each have five or six specific places in mind to fish,” Dickerson says. “Fish Mapping shows us which one will most likely be productive that day.” This predictive capability, Moore says, is especially important for commercial operations. “Charter guys will pay for anything that helps increase the chances that their clients go home happy.”

Given Fish Mapping’s price point, its flexible, no-contract subscription plans, and the fact that boaters also get SiriusXM’s Marine Offshore weather (a $60 value) with the monthly fee, the cons list is short. That said, Fish Mapping currently works only in North America, and its range is limited to 150 nautical miles from shore.

“We own our own geostationary satellites, and we only have two in use,” Dickerson says. “So [the satellite’s] footprint is the range of our coverage.”

Also, owners with satcom systems can’t use their antennas to catch Fish Mapping’s data. “The data isn’t on the internet, so it’s not possible to extend the range,” Dickerson says.

But if your angling ambitions fall within SiriusXM’s range, Fish Mapping could be an ideal tool to help land that prize species—rather than engaging in the also-ancient anglers’ art of embellishing about the ones that got away.

The post SiriusXM Marine Fish Mapping Finds The Fish appeared first on Yachting.

Predicting the future of marine electronics isn’t easy, but these four men are paid to do exactly that. Here’s a look at trends that are likely to be influential during the next five years, from the minds of Dave Dunn, Garmin’s director of sales and marketing for marine; Knut Frostad, CEO of Navico; Eric Kunz, Furuno’s senior product manager; and Jim McGowan, Raymarine’s Americas marketing manager. (Their words have been slightly edited for space and clarity.)

Q: Which consumer electronics trends are likely to affect marine electronics?

A: Dunn: Connectivity and integration. There’s more desire for third-party companies integrating with multifunction displays, and there’s more expectation from customers. I think there will be more boats without buttons and switches, as well as more digital-switching systems.

A: Frostad: Consumer electronics are starting to have a good learning experience. 2020 has been an amazing year for attracting new boaters, but it requires the user experience to be more educational. Voice assistance is becoming big on land. I think there will be more integration with phones and watches. On land, everything has a low-power mode to lower consumption—I think that’s where we’re going with marine.

A: Kunz: I think we’re going to see more control of the vessel and its onboard systems through multifunction displays. We’re going to see new sensors that produce more-accurate information at lower costs. For example, GPS III. I also think there will be more automation between handheld devices and the boat.

A: McGowan: The No. 1 thing I see is connectivity. Everything is connected in a house—temperature, music and security—and the demand is there to do that on boats. Getting to a mass-market solution is going to be key. All levels of vessel monitoring and niceties—turning on lights, engines, and AC and climate control—will be done through mobile devices.

Q: How important will artificial intelligence be?

A: Dunn: We’re seeing more and more augmented reality, and I think that will become more prominent. With AI, it’s hard to say; there are so many variables at sea. I don’t think it will be a prominent feature in the next five years. With 5G networks, you’ll be able to get better weather services from your phone, so maybe there will be better predictive routes with autoguidance, for example, if you go to the same places every weekend.

A: Frostad: Boats are suited to AI because there are a lot of variables that are hard to follow manually. For example, intelligent radar, where the system interprets the image: AI could separate the echoes and create an optimal route, in combination with the autopilot. Finding fish is another possibility. We’re going to use AI to improve the boating experience. For example, we could use machine learning to see how customers use their boats, so when they switch on the battery, the system turns on the boat the way they normally use it.

A: Kunz: I don’t see AI playing a big role in the next five years. But augmented reality, which combines different technologies to improve and automate situational awareness—say, by combining the functions of video, GPS and other sensors in ways that we weren’t able to do before—we’ll do that in the next five years.

A: McGowan: I think it will explode. We’re seeing the beginning with machine vision and advanced processing. It’s not quite AI, but the next logical step is for cameras to identify objects. It’s fair to call machine vision a learning system—it’s got a built-up knowledge base. We’re seeing it in automotive with pedestrian and animal detection and collision avoidance. The marine environment is a good place to develop that kind of technology; there’s a lot of water and not much else.

Q: Will the next breakthroughs be software-driven? Or will hardware and software development remain hand in hand?

A: Dunn: We’ll see faster multifunction-display processors, but the glass will look pretty much the same. Maybe there will be larger screens, but I think the major changes will be software-driven. Everything that we’re developing now for the next five years can run on today’s multifunction displays.

A: Frostad: They’re linked. The more you want to do, the more processor speed you need. We need to innovate quicker, but we can’t launch hardware like iPhones—we don’t have the scale. We’re still in the phase of bigger screens and super-wide format, which has great benefits. Higher-resolution screens mean more details, and details matter. The hardware will improve the user experience, but the software makes the experience better.

A: Kunz: I think it will be hand in hand. Today’s multifunction displays have the power that personal computers had just a few years ago. They’ve got gigabytes of memory, they’re robust, and they’re a dedicated and isolated platform, so they’re hard to hack. I think we’ll see things such as integrating different sensors, say, for personal bathymetric generation.

A: McGowan: I think they’ll remain hand in hand. Memory and processing have gotten cheap, but the software keeps getting more complicated. Companies will need to add processing power to keep it fast. No one likes waiting for a screen to populate—it’s got to be snappy. And when you add AI and internet connectivity, you’ll need horsepower.

Q: Will autonomous vessel operations become important? If so, will electronics or engine manufacturers supply the technology?

A: Dunn: It will absolutely be a big part of the marine-electronics market, likely sooner than later. For example, you’ll see more autodocking capabilities.

A: Frostad: I think marine-electronics manufacturers will provide the user interface through the multifunction display. With autonomous boats, the first step is to assist and not take over. On land, Tesla parks the car on a flat surface. Docking a boat, there are so many types of docks; there can be waves, tide, current and wind. So, we want to complement the user. And it’s not going to be cheap. There are 3,000 boat models, so we’ll need algorithms for each boat.

A: Kunz: Marine-electronics manufacturers will make the sensors, while other companies will make things like thermal and visual cameras and integrate them. There’s a push for engine manufacturers to produce systems that allow marine-electronics companies to control the vessel, but I think it will be a combination of companies.

A: McGowan: Five years from now, I expect a high level of integration between engine manufacturers and anyone they allow to control their engines. This won’t be a DIY kit—engine manufacturers are meticulous about testing third-party electronics on their engines. Engine manufacturers probably don’t have all the expertise; they’re looking for technology partners. Whose name is on it will likely be a business negotiation. Engine manufacturers make great products, but sensing and controls will likely come from the electronics and adjacent markets.

Q: How important will 5G cellular and low- and medium-Earth-orbit satellite networks be?

A: Dunn: It’s hard to say. I don’t think there will be any negative impacts. There’s been a lot written on 5G blocking GPS, but we don’t think it will have any adverse impact. I think there will be more real-time weather streaming and live fuel prices without dedicated communication antennas. There are a lot of green-pasture ideas. I think 5G will give us a lot more options and tools.

A: Frostad: My expectation is that few 5G providers will turn their antennas to the sea, and I expect even shorter ranges with 5G than with 4G. Will medium- and low-Earth-orbit satellites be the answer? Maybe. I haven’t seen Starlink’s prices, but they’ll have the capacity to provide speed and bandwidth offshore. 5G will have an impact, but if a boater is only in range 90 percent of the time, we can’t provide an always-on service. Starlink is interesting because it’s always on.

A: Kunz: These technologies will revolutionize connected boats. Current satellite-communications systems are expensive and bulky. Starlink antennas are 18 inches. I think it will change the way boats interact. Bandwidth will suddenly be available to do things that we haven’t thought of yet. For example, open-ocean AIS and real-time weather that’s sent directly to the multifunction display.

A: McGowan: It’s going to be key to have cheap, fast connectivity everywhere. That’s the biggest shortcoming right now. In a bay, 4G is pretty good, but in coastal waters, you can’t depend on it. Also, if you want to stream, there are data caps and slowdowns, so 5G could be the answer. When low-Earth-orbit satellite networks come online, they’ll be a game-changer. Satcom on low-Earth-orbit networks will be low cost compared to current solutions.

Q: Anything else?

A: Dunn: We’ll see the gap between consumer electronics and marine electronics close faster than ever before, and that’s extremely exciting.

A: Frostad: Twenty years ago, the attitude was, “Don’t touch the nav system,” but now kids see a touchscreen and want to play. Instead of just making electronics more advanced, we want to make them more inclusive. Think of modern TVs: They’re easy to navigate, and we want that user experience on the boat.

A: Kunz: I could see the rise of disruptive technologies—for example, Starlink. I think there will be streamlined navigation systems and increased safety, and I think multifunction displays as glass bridges will continue to evolve. I think there will also be predictive failure analysis, monitored through the multifunction display, where, for example, engines are connected to the internet.

A: McGowan: Connectivity is key to a lot of these questions, but with machine vision and AI, we’re only scratching the surface.

The post How Technology Will Drive Marine Electronics for Yachts appeared first on Yachting.

Knut Frostad, as skipper of Innovation Kvaerner, was topping the overall leaderboard in the 1997-98 Whitbread Round the World Race. He had just finished leg two, which stretched 4,600 nautical miles from Cape Town, South Africa, to Fremantle, Australia.

Several days earlier, Innovation Kvaerner had slipped into second place for the leg—a position that didn’t please Frostad or navigator Marcel van Triest. In an effort to reclaim the lead, they aggressively hunted a massive low-pressure system deep into the Southern Ocean. They found wind but suffered collateral damage: two broken steering wheels, shattered mainsail battens and other broken bits.

Night fell. Frostad found himself steering with 40-plus knots of wind howling through the rigging. Water was everywhere. He couldn’t see his instruments, so he had a crewmember call out the numbers as he surfed the vessel down huge seas at 30-plus knots.

“It was important to get to the bottom of a wave at the right wind angle to avoid gybing,” Frostad recalls. “I had to keep the boat between 120 degrees and 130 degrees. My crewmate started screaming when I got too low.”

While harrowing, the experience taught Frostad that he could trust his B&G instruments to help keep his crew safe. It was a lesson that would serve him well during his decorated sailing career and in his new role as Navico’s CEO.

The saying goes that experience is the best teacher and a driver of innovation, and Frostad has offshore miles and leadership lessons to spare. These include three and a half circumnavigations during the Whitbread and the Volvo Ocean Race, numerous Atlantic crossings, and an extended cruise with his family aboard their former Outremer 5X catamaran. All up, Frostad has cruised more than 280,000 nautical miles.

Then, there was his work as CEO for three editions of the Volvo Ocean Race. When he started there, media engagement was a borderline afterthought; by the time he left, he had helped to revolutionize the race’s storytelling capabilities vis-a-vis drones, onboard reporters and satellite communications. Additionally, Frostad served on the board of directors for Navico—parent company of B&G, C-Map, Lowrance and Simrad—for 14 years before signing on as CEO in June 2019.

Eight months later, Frostad, Navico and the entire world sailed into the unforeseeable hurricane called the COVID-19 pandemic.

“It brought me right back to my Volvo Ocean Race days,” Frostad says. “As a Volvo Ocean Race skipper, you only know that something will [eventually] go really wrong … so you practice crisis situations. When something happens, you activate the crisis plan. We did this at Navico, and we got the company through in a healthy way, although it’s far from over yet.”

While fallback positions are important, Frostad is quick to acknowledge that the best sailors remain calm in rowdy weather. “We almost enjoy it,” he says. “That attitude has been really helpful during the pandemic.”

Another important tool that Frostad acquired during his racing days is the ability to read people and have empathy for their challenges. “You can’t close your office door,” he says, adding that aboard offshore-racing sailboats, “everyone will know everything about you.”

Even today, he values people and embraces a transparent leadership style. For example, Frostad freely admits that he knew relatively little about manufacturing practices before taking over Navico’s reins, so he put himself on a steep learning curve. “How well you manufacture has a massive impact,” he says of a company’s bottom line, adding that—just as in sailing—how well a team works together makes a huge difference. “An [offshore-sailing] team needs to get a little faster every day. It’s a relentless pursuit of improvement.”

While Frostad was accustomed to managing a global organization, taking over as Navico’s CEO created different challenges. “We have over 2,000 people in over 40 sites in 24 countries,” he says. In a way, the pandemic provided cohesion. “It was one thing we all had to rally around,” he says.

Frostad is a self-described tech geek who clearly understood—and trusted—B&G’s sailing-specific electronics prior to accepting the job. However, he admits to another knowledge gap when it comes to the power-cruising and fishing markets.

“One thing that you can’t learn early enough are your customers’ real needs,” he says. “Fishing is a new world to me. The mentality of wanting to know every detail of the seafloor—I’m blown away by it. I can relate with wind shifts in sailing, but you need to experience it to understand it.”

Which is precisely what he did in the months preceding the pandemic. “The big thing to learn was sonar and transducers,” he says. “I’ve spent a lot of time studying this technology, and I’m still learning.”

Looking ahead, Frostad points to artificial intelligence and how it could be leveraged to enhance boating. “It’s easy to go crazy with technology, so we have to stay true to the basics, like safety,” he says. “Marine electronics need to work when you leave the dock, so we test products and make them 100 percent reliable. It’s why we work with the Volvo Ocean Race or many of the best professionals.”

This, of course, is the same methodical approach that enabled B&G to build the wind-sensing electronics that kept Frostad and his Innovation Kvaerner crew alive in the Southern Ocean that windswept night.

He knows, as a boater himself, that recreational boating is a passion more than anything else. “No one needs it—they do it because they love it,” Frostad says. “They might only use their boat for one or two months a year, but it’s their highlight. I get to work at a company where we make [their experiences] better. It’s a gift.”

The post From Ocean to Boardroom appeared first on Yachting.

It’s hard to believe, but this year marks my 10th anniversary covering electronics for Yachting. To celebrate, I thought it would be fun to compare two leading marine-electronics technologies—radar and sonar—and see how products that were available during my freshman year have evolved over a decade.

And to do that, we have to go back a bit further in time. While it’s easy to point at the atomic bomb as the technology that decided World War II, historians acknowledge that it was the invention of the cavity magnetron by British scientists—which lead to creating small, field-deployable radio-detection and ranging systems—that truly devastated Axis forces. Raytheon created the first recreational radar following WWII, and yachtsmen soon embraced the technology.

Radars generate pulses of radio-frequency energy and transmit them from a rotating directional antenna, forming each pulse into a narrow wedge. This energy travels at the speed of light and bounces off targets before returning to the antenna as an echo. Radars calculate the range to a target by measuring the time difference between when a signal is transmitted and when its retuning echo arrives; bearing is determined by measuring the radar antenna’s angle when the return is received.

Radar manufacturers started employing digital signal processing in the early to mid-2000s to better differentiate signal from noise.

“Ten years ago, we offered radar with DSP, but the front-end [signal] was still analog,” says Jim McGowan, Raymarine’s Americas marketing manager. “Instead of [traditional] analog filters, we fed the full [analog] signal to the [DSP] computer.”

Other manufacturers took similar steps. Don Korte, Navico’s principal validation engineer, says B&G, Lowrance and Simrad radars from a decade ago were “pulse radars [that] were mostly analog with cavity-resonant magnetrons. The receiver had to track the magnetron.”

Manufacturers revolutionized radar in the mid-2010s when they began replacing magnetrons with solid-state gallium-nitride transistors. Unlike cavity magnetrons, whose frequencies vary over time and with temperature swings, gallium-nitride power amplifiers transmit highly predicable frequencies, simplifying data processing and improving image resolution.

Moreover, while cavity magnetrons transmit peak bursts of RF energy over minute time slices (say, 0.08 microseconds), digital radars transmit lower levels of RF energy as compressed high-intensity radiated pulses. The latter are much like modern sounders, spreading the pulses over longer intervals (say, 100 microseconds). Solid-state transistors also produce better pulse shapes.

“The pulse goes out in one shape, and it comes back as a mirror image,” McGowan says, adding that the radar’s computer overlays these returns and uses algorithms and DSP to filter out noise. “It’s better at delivering target separation…we can do a lot more radar detection with a lot less power.”

Predictable frequencies and chirp transmissions opened the door for Doppler-enabled recreational radars in 2016. Doppler-enabled radars color code targets based on threat level, simplifying what can otherwise feel like a dark art.

“Most people don’t know how to read radar,” says Dave Dunn, Garmin’s director of sales and marketing for marine, adding that with Doppler processing, “if they see red, it’s bad. [Doppler] takes the stress out of it.”

Adjustments with Doppler include collision avoidance, Korte says, and mariners also can adjust their Doppler speed control to determine whether a distant storm is approaching or departing.

While there’s no question that Doppler processing simplifies radar use, Matt Wood, Furuno’s national sales manager, points to solid-state transistors as radar’s biggest gain in the past decade.

“The biggest advantage is that there’s no more magnetron,” Wood says, adding that cavity magnetrons are expensive, consumable parts, whereas solid-state amplifiers last for the life of the radar. “Solid-state transmissions are cleaner, and there’s more of a defined center frequency.” Also, Wood says, solid-state radars consume less power and emit less radiation than cavity-magnetron systems, while putting specific radiated power onto targets.

On the display side, older radars offered 8-bit color, while modern multifunction displays have graphically rich, full-color screens. “The radar gives the picture, but the MFD does the interpretation with colors and intensity,” McGowan says.

Moreover, while modern radars digitally process and filter returning echoes in their scanners and stream this data over Ethernet to networked MFDs. Korte says that, in turn, modern MFDs must be capable of processing multiple data streams for dual-range operations.

Moving forward, expect higher-power solid-state radars that are better suited for finding distant birds. “Solid-state radars are equivalent to common magnetron power ratings now,” Wood says. “The next step involves increasing solid-state ratings to exceed how we’ve traditionally measured radar output power.”

The story of sonar’s evolution is impossible to tell without talking about chirp and DSP, however, it’s important to remember that the physics of sonar—namely, harnessing sound propagation to identify underwater targets—haven’t changed.

“A decade ago [side-looking sonar] was in its infancy, [down-scanning sonar] hadn’t been invented yet, and chirp sonar required a [black-box] module and a very expensive transducer in all displays,” says Matthew Laster, Navico’s displays product manager. “Today, all of those things are built into the most basic of displays.”

Moreover, most legacy sonars broadcast on dual frequencies (50 and 200 kilohertz) and employed black-and-white or limited-color displays. However, they typically used DSP to separate signal from noise.

As with radar, Wood says, much of this evolution can be traced back to the trend in the computer-electronics industry of gradually miniaturizing componentry and reducing manufacturing costs. With regards to sonar, this miniaturization and cost competitiveness is evident in chirp-enabled transducers and sonar modules, the latter of which matriculated from downstream black boxes to built-in applications that reside on today’s highly capable MFDs, which themselves have become powerful marinized computers with full-color displays.

Unlike traditional sonars, chirp sonars, which became widely available in 2013, simultaneously transmit over a spread of kilohertz frequencies.

“It’s the rise and fall of the sweep [transmissions] that give chirp sonar its favorable characteristics,” McGowan says, adding that traditional sonar transmissions—when studied on an oscilloscope—look like square-shaped waves and are far better at attaining accurate depth metrics than at identifying water-column targets or discerning bottom structure.

By comparison, “chirp transmissions look like mountain peaks,” McGowan says, adding that modern sonars lay these returning echoes over each other to determine the center of mass in objects that are close together (such as a baitball). Dunn likens traditional sonar to playing a song on a piano with just two keys, while chirp encompasses a music scale’s worth of notes.

“You can play a much prettier song than you can with just two notes,” he says, adding that chirp’s notes “give you much better target separation.”

Wood agrees, adding that “a transducer is to a sounder what a speaker is to a stereo. Chirping is a big deal because you’re looking at one or multiple ranges of frequencies.” Because of this relationship, Wood says, chirp-enabled transducers have played a significant role in sonar’s evolution. In sonar parlance, the Q-factor refers to a transducer’s propensity to ring after its power source is removed. While ideal in acoustic instruments, sonar transducers need to effectively self-mute after each transmission so they are ready to vibrate when the echo returns. Because of this, low-Q factor ceramics and components are fundamental to sonar’s evolution.

Likewise, and given the volume of data that chirp-enabled sonars generate, McGowan points to better, faster processors as another crucial step in sonar’s evolution.

“To get to chirp, we needed DSP to already be there,” he says.

As impressive as chirp technology is for target separation and image clarity, sonar’s evolution didn’t stop there; companies now offer down-, forward- and side-looking sonars that reveal everything from bottom structure to water-column targets and thermoclines. Moreover, some manufacturers now offer sonars that chirp on megahertz frequencies to yield picturelike sonar imagery of shallow soundings. There are also sonars that scan entire areas, rather than just pinging.

“As a kid, I used fathometer paper,” Dunn says. “Now, I can see fish swim up to the line and hit my bait.”

Expect even more refinement of single-frequency and multifrequency transmissions, multibeam technologies, and wide-beam sonar. Also, Wood says, “people want a [compact, high-power,] forward-looking array for safety on approach…that gives a range that’s five to six times the depth [in deep water]. But nobody’s there.” Yet.

The post A Decade of Growth for Marine Electronics appeared first on Yachting.