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It was a few Miami boat
shows back, and I was using the peaceful hour before the gates officially
opened to nose around the in-water exhibit area. As I’d hoped, I
was soon sitting at the helm of a fine yacht, checking out the electronics
and enjoying a relaxed conversation with a company principal. By and by
this forward-thinking gentleman declared himself to be quite the fan of
PC charting programs, though chagrined that his own electronics guys were
a bit inept at maintaining and upgrading his personal boat’s computer.
At this point another fellow, who coincidentally turned out to be the
service manager for this substantial builder, popped his head up from
down below and delivered a passionate harangue about the unreliable nature
of marine computers. “But, isn’t this a computer?” said
I, pointing at the yacht’s Northstar 962, which had actually just
shown a fleeting Windows splash screen as it powered up. “Absolutely
not!” he said, absolutely wrong.
I’m being somewhat
unfair; even today, Northstar doesn’t market the 962 as a marine
computer—in part, I suspect, because of still commonly held negative
feelings about the breed—and it surely doesn’t “look”
like a computer. The button controls and bright screen of the 962’s
waterproof “control head” casing are easily mistaken for a
dedicated chartplotter; there’s no mouse or keyboard cluttering
the helm. But behind the scenes, interpreting those button pushes and
driving that display, is a separate processing unit containing a conventional
Intel chip set, a hard drive, and various standard I/O plugs, and the
whole operation is managed with the Windows operating system (OS), albeit
mostly hidden from view. Northstar had to use this architecture to achieve
the 962’s primary feature: the display of raster charts that are
like digital photographs of the paper charts so familiar to its users.
Raster charts are huge files, and it would have been prohibitively expensive
to engineer a box from scratch to handle them, especially back in 1999
when the original 961 was introduced.
In fact, there’s
still no such animal as an “embedded” raster chartplotter,
embedded meaning that all the navigation and operating software is custom-designed
right into the device. However, the differences between embedded and PC
navigation have moved from black and white to many shades of gray since
1999. Northstar’s 960 family was a highly innovative “gray
area” design in its time—actually it’s still a beloved
tool on many a bridge—and a look back at it is useful for understanding
what’s going on today as well as what the company is up to with
its new 972.
An old saw I’m
fond of defines a gentleman as a fellow who can play the bagpipes—but
doesn’t. Well, one definition of a nicely mannered navigation computer
is a machine that could run Word or Internet Explorer or whatever—but
won’t. An industrious hacker could probably get even an old 961
to run PC games, but Northstar never intended such use; its designers
locked up the OS—that momentary boot screen is the only sign of
it you’ll see—and devoted the PC power to the job at hand.
The same is true of Maptech’s i3, the marine computer also known
as the Sea Ray Navigator, and the new Waypoint, not to mention the big
ECDIS (Electronic Chart Display and Information System) boxes on ship
bridges. PCs that only run the software loaded by their manufacturer are
much less likely to crash or slow down over time.
You could argue that
this characteristic—Northstar calls it purpose built—is a
limitation; you can’t, for instance, just plug one of XM’s
or WSI’s cool satellite marine weather receivers (see “New
Times Two,” August 2004) into a 962 and load the companion software.
But it’s hard to argue with success. I regularly run into boaters,
often seasoned types, who simply love their 962, even if it’s a
bit slow compared to today’s PCs and embedded plotters. Kevin Rickets,
Northstar’s director of engineering and an enthusiastic fisherman,
has a relevant anecdote. Apparently there’s a hot spot north of
Cape Cod Bay traditionally known as “between the Ls” because
it happens to lie betwixt the two Ls in the label “Stellwagen Bank”
on the paper chart of the area. The NOAA cartographer who placed those
words there years ago never intended to mark a precise spot, but an oldtime
fisherman who can bring up that exact image on his 962 and drop a waypoint
“between the Ls”—with just a button push, Windows be
damned—is apt to be a happy guy.
Next page >
Part
2: All these specialized marine computers suffer from high prices. > Page 1, 2,
3, 4, 5,
6, 7
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