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Are
you familiar with R2D2, the cute, little ‘droid from the Star Wars
series? In movies full of dazzling technology, he—I mean it—is
the rather homely machine that nonetheless serves as a bright and able
sidekick to the human star. As I study Furuno’s new RD-30 display
device, I can’t help but draw some parallels. The RD-30 is also
diminutive—about eight by five inches—and its 41⁄2-inch
(diagonal) monochrome screen is downright doughty in this world of big,
bright color displays. Even its essential function of manipulating, presenting,
and distributing data via the plain old NMEA 0183 protocol is not exactly
futuristic. But this “lil’ feller” could be a smart
and handy mate to today’s data-swamped skipper.
For
instance, what method of boat speed display works best for you? Do you
want to have one big digital readout filling the RD-30’s entire
screen? Okay, boss. Or perhaps you want that screen shared two or four
ways with other data? No problem, cap. Or how about a needle-on-dial,
automobile-style speedometer customized exactly to your boat’s top
end? My specialty, sir! Of course you can choose the unit of measurement
that suits you, and you can also set high, low, and range alarms and even
spec an alternate screen graphing your speed over a variable time period.
Depending
how you feed it, the RD-30 can slice and dice wind, heading, depth, water
temperature, and other sensor data in a similar fashion. It can also receive
waypoint calculations from your GPS or plotter and put the values in data
windows or present them in a familiar highway display. So what’s
the appeal of this feature if your plotter can already do it? Well, it’s
turning out that predictions of an all-in-one navigation screen may rank
accuracy-wise with the famous “paperless office” (I’m
among the guilty). I observed two experienced navigators as they got to
know their new ten-inch, high-bright color plotters last summer. I wasn’t
surprised that they both fell in love, but I learned something when each
complained about having to obscure even a few square inches of their glorious
electronic charts with needed data windows. Like money and horsepower,
“enough” screen space may turn out to be an elusive goal.
That’s
why some skippers adopt a strategy of offloading easy data display chores
to small, relatively inexpensive monochrome screens and hoard bright color
for complex chart, radar, and fishfinder imagery. This is not an entirely
new idea. For years, instrument systems have been pushing numbers around
boats, usually using some sort of proprietary networking. And some clever
folks have been using NMEA 0183 to move numbers from a busy device to
an underused corner of a radar or autopilot display. Raymarine’s
brand new ST290 system adds so many new graphic and networking capabilities
to the instrument strategy that it deserves its own column (stay tuned).
Meanwhile, the RD-30 kicks up the 0183 technique several notches.
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