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Wille
Meinhardt is similarly pleased with his EchoPilot FLS Silver model navigating
the thicket of 30,000 islands—and many more ledges—along the
coast of his native Sweden, “To cruise among all those islands means
that you have to have a constant check on the chart in order not to lose
a grip on where you are,” he says. And even if you manage to keep
the grip, there are uncharted ledges in this area. Meinhardt happily reports
that his FLS seems able to better the 6:1 distance-to-depth ratio when
the danger is a steep, hard surface, and he has thus avoided contact with
a couple of such rocks. He has had problems with the display fading out
after a day in direct sunlight but says that EchoPilot has provided a
new—but yet untested—unit.
Sheldon
Haynie is another satisfied FLS user with another modus operandi. Haynie
cruises out of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and must often buck the mighty
tidal currents of the Piscataqua River in his relatively pokey sailboat.
He uses Interphase’s PCView, “a very capable tool,”
to avoid shoals and “old sunken pickups” as he hugs the shore
in search of back eddies. PCView is a black box product, feeding Haynie’s
laptop with the same vertical scan imagery as shown on the Probe and Outlook,
but with more pixels and in color. Its transducer, the size of “half
a grapefruit,” can also scan horizontally 45 degrees to port and
starboard at a fixed 20-degree downward angle. This is a harder image
to interpret, but Haynie likes it to “ride the edge of the channel.”
Interphase president Charles Hicks tells me that customers transiting
the Intracoastal Waterway like the horizontal scan, also found in the
Twinscope product, because it not only warns of danger ahead but may also
indicate an alternate course.
EchoPilot
also offers a sort of horizontal scanning product, but it is quite dissimilar,
requiring the user to physically turn the transducer sideways, and is
meant for bottom analysis rather than grounding avoidance. The significant
difference in the two companies’ vertical scanning technologies
is that EchoPilot fires and receives back its echoes in one instantaneous
process while Interphase utilizes an eight-element phased array. EchoPilot
claims that its method delivers very fast profiles that are particularly
valuable as a boat maneuvers. Interphase counters that its users can use
“Width” and “Mode” controls to choose between
fast images or detailed ones.
Judging
from the experience of my correspondents, to whom I’m grateful,
neither version of FLS is magic, but either can help you keep your bottom
intact if you understand its limits, and yours. As Haynie says, “It’s
still possible to run aground when not looking,” and my Swedish
friend adds, “Of course, with this instrument I’m taking some
chances I would not have taken without it.”
Interphase
Technologies Phone: (831) 477-4944. Fax: (831) 462-7444. www.interphase-tech.com.
Pilot
Marine (EchoPilot U.S. distributor) Phone: (757) 430-3344. www.pilotmarine.com.
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