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Bosun’s Mate Greg
Allain handled the 27-foot Coast Guard utility boat with cool expertise,
skipping over the lumpy remnants of hurricane Olga at 35 knots. The hits
telegraphing directly through the welded-aluminum hull were very close
to painful, but my two fellow passengers were grinning broadly. We were
taking this licking off Cape Canaveral to see if a remarkable new device
called the Sea Ray Navigator (SRN) would keep on ticking, and it did.
EchoFlight systems vice president Rob Knapp and Maptech development team
leader Talbot Pratt had already spent more months than planned struggling
to realize this radical vision of a central boat computer, and the personal
discomfort was minor compared to their pride and pleasure watching the
SRN stand up to this bone-jarring step in Sea Ray’s rigorous testing
process.
At first glance, the
Navigator looks like yet another chartplotter or marine PC monitor, but
actually it’s both and more. The vision is a deeply integrated "boat
brain" that can bring the advantages of the megayacht "integrated
bridge" to medium-size vessels and go further by integrating a marine
electronics package into a whole line of boats, factory floor to water.
The result is a dedicated Windows-running computer built like a brick
you-know-what, loaded with specially designed software, and bristling
with connectivity.
The first thing you’ll
notice is the touch-screen interface. Here Windows itself is invisible;
instead the dedicated screens have a curvaceous and decorative style that
says "Sea Ray." Second, it’s quickly evident that the software
was carefully designed to work with a blunt-finger pointer, unlike some
optional touch screens I’ve tried. (The auxiliary "joystick
mouse" is useful for times, like during our test, when your hand
wants to stay in one place.)
After the initial delight
of dragging a chart around the high-bright screen with a fingertip, you’ll
find a rare blend of PC power and plotter simplicity. Developer Maptech
has been creating PC charting software (and data) for years but started
this project with a blank sheet. Pratt says the design mantra was "more
features, less complexity," and their success is apparent. All the
fancy stuff–photo maps, contour charts, pilot books, infinite routes,
etc.–is on (finger) tap, but it’s near impossible to get lost
in menu thickets. Pleasantly missing are all the setup screens common
to PC programs, which come up when PCs must recognize and adapt to a wide
variety of hardware. I imagine the programmers also appreciated designing
for a unified hardware package and were better able to focus on user features
like the nifty "look ahead" data window, which projects a single
contour along the heading line, even issuing alarms if it sees a user-configured
danger depth ahead.
Next page >
Boat Brain, Part 2 > Page 1, 2,
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