Cheap marine electronics

It’s not like it used to be in marine electronics. In the past, a company with an innovative design could keep the price high. Not so today, almost every marine electronics manufacturer uses the same off-the-shelf components to design their marine electronic products with.

And those components are becoming less expensive, not more. Those components, also known as integrated circuits, follow a law known as Moore’s law. This law coined in the 1960s, states that every two years, the size of integrated circuits decreases by half. Put another way, as time moves on component costs drop, size decreases and performance increases.

For those who want the best marine electronics at the lowest price, Moore’s law is important. Knowing, for example, that the expensive thermal imager you’ve been eyeing will in two years have twice the performance, be half the size and cost 10 to 30 percent less could be a decisive purchasing consideration. In fact, it may be just enough to make you think about buying used. Not just on a once-in-a-while basis, but on an ongoing basis.

One of the best reasons for buying used is that, if you’re willing to live behind the technology curve by just a few years, your overall marine electronics costs will be less, and, if you do it right, your boat will, over the long term, run at a higher technology level.

However, determining whether or not the used marine electronics path is right for you, requires some cost analysis. For this undertaking, determine what your long-term annual marine electronics budget is. Once you have that decided, make a list of what you’ll need to buy. Then compare the used costs versus the cost of buying new.

What you will find out, once you factor Moore’s law in, is that buying used equipment frequently will result in more modern marine electronics on your boat than buying new items once in a great while.

The decision to buy second hand, or even refurbished, should however not be taken lightly. Always find out about the used product and how it compares with the newer marine electronic devices. A good starting place is the installation and operations manuals that are often posted online at the manufacturer’s web site.

Knowing how to operate marine electronics devices can also really help in making a used buying decision. And that’s because you can test the functionality first hand before you make a purchase. That is, of course, if the product is not bought sight unseen.

When you buy a product sight unseen, especially an electronics device, it’s a good idea to get at least a 30-day warranty. That’s not because the product might stop working in less than 30 days, but because that’s about the amount of time you need to find out if all the features work.

Overall though, marine electronics product reliability is generally good, if not better than your typical PC. And one of the reasons is that most marine electronic devices have solid state memory as opposed to the rotating memory that most PCs rely on. The advantage of not having rotating memory is that there is also no rotating motor, which means there are no moving parts to wear out.

Apelco marine electronics

Apelco, the former Recreational Marine Division of Raytheon, was acquired by Raymarine several years ago. Raymarine still supports the Apelco product line, (which includes marine VHF radios, GPS enabled fishfinders and chartplotters) as legacy products.

On Raymarine’s web site you will find detailed documentation not only on how to operate all of Apelco’s equipment, but also the information you need to repair the devices. The documentation on Apelco’s devices not only includes detailed operating instructions, but the actual electronic schematics of fishfinders, giving you some insight into not only how to repair, but design and build a fishfinder, GPS unit or chartplotter.

For example, the VHF-FM Radiotelephone’s instruction manual for the Clipper 82, gives complete installation and operating instructions, detailed electronic schematics, electrical specifications, and the data sheets and application notes for the integrated circuits used in the design. But there’s even more. The documentation also includes a good deal of generally useful boating information, like a map of all the Coast Guard stations.

If you’re looking to find out more about the Apelco’s XCD 241 LDC fishfinder, you will find complete documentation on the Raymarine web site as well. That documentation includes everything you need to know to operate, maintain and repair your fishfinder: Electrical specifications, transducer accessories, transducer and transom installation are all completely laid out with old fashioned and easy to read pen and ink illustrations.

If you’re looking for GPS navigation capability in your fishfinder, and want to know the basics about GPS and sonar, you can look at Raymarine’s Apelco 560 Fishfinder/GPS documentation.

Once you review the literature, you can see that even old time products have many modern and useful features. The Apelco fishfinder, besides being water proof, having a split screen layout, and a 128X 160 pixel SuperTwist LCD, comes complete with what you need in sonar; a scan forward water depth of 600 feet and dual beam transmissions.

Beyond fishfinding, the GPS chartplotter also has numerous navigation features, These include two GPS navigation modes, a waypoint node, plot mode, route mode, and a course deviation indicator. Overall the GPS can store 10 routes and 200 waypoints.

The 560 originally came out in 1998 priced at $820.00 with a transom-mounted transducer and $1,135.00 with a bronze hull transducer. But that doesn’t mean you’ll pay anywhere close to that today. Looking on Craiglists you’ll find Apelco units, still in the unopened box, in the $20.00 to $50.00 dollar range.

Raymarine Electronics

However, in the long term, the acquisition of Raymarine Electronics may just change boating navigation technology forever. And the reason is that FLIR plans to use Raymarine Electronics sales and distribution channels to make thermal imaging a standard item on every boat.

FLIR Systems, which was built on thermal imaging technology, has been successful for years selling high end thermal imaging devices. However, its success has been primarily in the marine segments of the defense, security and surveillance industries, not the recreational boater market.

Although FLIR has been selling its thermal imaging products into the non-security segments of the marine market since 2006, the company so far has not obtained the market penetration levels it wants. And this is despite the fact that thermal imaging technology has been advancing and costs dropping.

With even more advances in thermal technology expected and lower prices to come, the opportunity to buy Raymarine could not have come at a better time for FLIR. The acquisition of Raymarine, which has an established business network in the recreational boaters market, correctly positions FLIR to obtain market share right before technologically induced priced drops accelerate demand.

With lower costs, the marine market for thermal imagers could very well become just as big a market as marine radar or sonar. Eventually, the market theory goes, boaters will see the advantage of not only having low-cost night vision binoculars, but also integrating 3D thermal image layers and views into their chart plotters.

The reasons why thermal imagers, also referred to as night vision devices, will become a mainstream marine navigational technology are many. Among them is the ability to more safely navigate waterways at night. Thermal imaging systems, unlike radar, give an actual 3D view of what’s in the dark seascape beyond.

With a thermal imager one can clearly see unlit docks, people and boats in the dark. And that’s because thermal imagers work on the basis of heat; different object temperatures are displayed in different colors.

Thermal imagers don’t offer absolute simulated day vision now, but if you look at the thermal images in FLIR’s line, you can see that the technology is getting very close.

Right now however, what makes thermal imagers even more of a deal besides a price that is within reason, is that they have incredible zoom ranges. Some night vision systems let you telescope in on objects that are up to two miles away. This feature not only makes thermal vision systems ideal for search and rescue operations, but also an ideal collision avoidance tool.

But what makes thermal imagers more interesting is that they can be systematically programmed for a wide variety of different navigation applications. A thermal imaging scanner combined with PC software can make for a sophisticated automatic object identification system. Thermal image scanners can be programmed to automatically search for objects that are within specific temperature ranges or have specific thermal fingerprints.

Understanding the world of wholesale marine electronics can be a complicated pursuit. Where one company might look at buying wholesale as buying direct from the manufacturer, another might look at it as buying from a distributor, and a third might look at wholesale as buying from distributors, manufacturers and importers.

The end result, as anyone who has scoured the Internet for the best prices knows, is a wide range of prices on any particular product. For the consumer, this means that if you look around long enough you may be able to find a great deal.

For many though, looking endlessly on the Internet for the lowest price isn’t their idea of a boating trip. Many in fact shy away from online purchasing all together. And that’s often because they don’t want to purchase something sight unseen. Others though, will often make a great effort to learn about a product and even try it out at the local marine electronics store, before, to the disdain of the retailer, buying it much cheaper online.

The truth of the matter is that online wholesale marine electronics outfits have a tremendous advantage over marine electronics retail stores. That’s because your store down at the dock not only has to add the mark-up from a distributor but also factor in brick and mortar costs, like rent.

Although marine retail outlets will always have their appeal, especially to those that like the brick-and-mortar shopping experience, it doesn’t mean online wholesale marine electronics outlets will stop striving to close in on retail outlet strongholds. And those strongholds are many. Customer service, knowledgeable sales staff, and of course, something fun to do are but a few.

This means that if online wholesale marine electronics companies are to capture more retail market share, they will have to address these issues. And they are expected to, once the video technology becomes available.

With the next generation of microprocessors and PCs, video is expected to come into its own. And with it, wholesale marine electronics outfits, which are often run by independent marine electronics retail stores, will provide the ability for you to see, talk to and get to know the sales wizards behind the online marine electronics curtain.

Another trend in the marine electronics market is for marine electronics manufactures to not only establish their own distribution channels, but also outright purchase existing marine electronics distribution companies to gain regional market shares. In fact, many marine electronics companies have done just that, buying up distributors not to eliminate distributor mark-up, but to boost their own profit margins.

As more marine electronics manufacturers adopt this business strategy, the end-result will be lower prices. That’s because eliminating the distributor’s cut from the retail price will allow them to gain market share.

Although the marine electronics manufacturers would like to sell direct to the consumer in their own retail outlet, odds are they will never be able to with their present business models. Unlike cell phone companies that have their own stores, the economics of scale will prevent marine electronics manufacturers from having their own stores.

That is unless, perhaps, they move into cell phone territory by incorporating cell phone technology into GPS units. Which of course is exactly what Garmin has done. Its GPS phone, the nuvifone, is available exclusively through AT&T, which, case in point, has a well-established national network of stores.

At Eagle Electronics’ web site not only will you find all sorts of product emulators for Eagle’s fish finders and GPS units, but all the documentation you’ll need to get the most out of them.

This means that not only will you be able to learn just how to work sonar and GPS units; but will be able to evaluate the ocean full of features that Eagle marine electronics devices offer.

These devices feature everything under the sun. Not only do you get configuration and programming capabilities, but you also get all the essential electronic hardware you need to go with it.

That hardware, which combines together GPS and fish finder functionality into one chart plotter unit, gives the software what it needs to navigate more securely and find what’s underwater quickly.

Eagle’s electronic sonar technology, which comes standard in its fish finders, offers 1500 watts of controllable peak power, allowing you to see fish all the way down to 800 feet.

But there’s a lot more than depth to Eagle’s sonar, and that’s speed. The sonar technology the company uses, besides a fish detection area of 70 degrees, actually works at boat speeds up to 70 miles per hour (61 knots). And it does it all with amazing clarity, even allowing you to fine-tune the clarity with the help of a ping speed adjustment.

At those speeds you’ll need sonar replay to review the underwater regions you’re scanning. And that’s just what Eagle offers. Sonar scanned images as well as data logs can be saved in real time and played back, not just on your color chartplotter, but also on your regular PC.

Enabling you to turn your fish finder into a environmental monitoring system, you can use your sonar logs to mark specific waypoints where underwater eco systems thrive. The system’s software also lets you identify specific fish types with different fish icons as well as set alarms that will automatically alert you when you are over shallow or deep water as well as fishing zones.

For mapping, Eagle also engraves a world base map into its marine electronics products, This map not only details the continental United States and Hawaii, but also provides over 60,000 nav-aids so that you have what you need to navigate around obstructions at critical navigation junctions. Add to that 40 map zoom ranges, from 0.02 to 4,000 miles and you have the power to mark your waypoints, event markers and routes with outstanding precision.

Besides its base map, you can add more mapping power with Eagle’s GPS Mapping Accessories Pack and MapCreate. Beyond that, Eagle’s marine devices are compatible with a number of other brands like Lowrance Freed Maps, LakeMaster Pro Maps, NauticPath and Navionics electronic charts.

Eagle’s chartplotters, because they are light weight and portable and have GPS/Waas receivers, are also great for inland waterways and hiking in general. And that’s because Waas enabled GPS lets you pinpoint your own location down below 3 meters, giving you the power to record your routes down to the nearest footstep.

However, if your pontoon is going to get you and your guests anywhere, and get you there in comfort, you will need an electric motor. And for that, you will need to know not only electric motor specifications, but also battery and solar panel specifications.

One of the first specifications to look at is the electric motor’s horsepower specification. The horsepower lets you estimate just how fast and hard your electric motor can pull. And that’s because one horsepower is roughly the power that one wild and free horse can put out in an hour. You can expect about the power of one horse from a one horsepower electric motor.

Next, you have to consider your electric motor’s ampere requirements. Your motor, in order to deliver horsepower, requires that it be supplied amperes. The more amperes you supply, invariably, the faster your pontoon will move.

As with cars, a primary concern about electric motors is their miles per ampere-hour rating. Just like cars have a miles per gallon rating, electric boats have a miles per ampere-hour rating.

Some electric motors are better than others, however as a general rule of thumb you’ll be able to get about 2 miles per ampere-hour from a lightweight electric pontoon, which works out to be about 24 miles per kilowatt-hour.

Besides your boat’s miles per ampere rating, it’s helpful to calculate just how far you can travel on one battery charge. This requires that you know how many ampere-hours that your battery stores when fully charged and your boat’s miles per ampere-hour rating. For a boat with an electronic fuel consumption rate of 2 miles per ampere-hour and a battery tank size of 24 ampere-hours, simply multiplying the two together will get you the distance, 48 miles.

The electronic fuel consumption rating of your pontoon and the ampere-hour of your battery can also be used to help you determine what size solar panels you will need to power your pontoon.

Here, one of the important specifications is the Watt rating of the solar panel. If you have a 1000 Watt solar panel, and it’s a very sunny day, your solar panel has the potential to deliver 1000 watts per hour (1 kilowatt-hour); more than enough to supply all the electronic fuel for a lightweight pontoon.

However, consider the fact that the slower you go, the more solar power you can save over a given distance. And this means, just like regular engines, the slower you go the farther you’ll get.

Boat battery switches have been around for ages. Their job on the boat has traditionally been to switch in a battery back-up to start combustion engines.

Today though, solar boaters need and do more with battery switches than ever before. They not only switch backup batteries into and out of circuits, but also connect solar panels, solar devices and marine electronics equipment into fail-safe power networks.

Beyond backup power to start an engine, this means that boaters must also consider backup power for their navigation, communication and vital appliances such as watermakers and emergency light and radio beacons.

Those concerned about safety at sea often design their electrical systems around battery bank configurations that are prioritized around safety considerations. In such configurations, energy sources, such as solar cells, wind generators and hydro generators, are matched to specific battery banks that power specific sets of electronic devices and appliances.

Efficient marine power management requires that you have a network of switches that will allow you to efficiently redirect power from energy sources to batteries and appliances. For this, there are power management control units, run by power management software, that automate the often overbearing task of manually turning on and off equipment.

Power management units, which are basically an automated bank of boat battery switches, will turn power on and off, connect low batteries to energy generators and also reorient the direction of your solar panels for you. Even better power management systems have easy to use interfaces that display exactly how much energy is being generated by each energy source and the level of electrical energy in each of your batteries, and then to top it off, feed that into your route planning software.

Full-featured power management units even let you program in your own power alarm notices and personalize your own power efficiency strategies This enables you to configure automated energy saving functions, like turning off lights and disconnecting entertainment devices whenever power resources become strained.

When you design your boat’s power system, one way to start is by dividing your electronics and power sources into definitive groups. For example, lump all your high power appliances into one group. There, put watermakers, heaters, generators and microwaves. For your low power group, select devices like your cell phone, calculators, small lights and flashlights. For your medium power group select items like your PC, mid-sized lanterns and lights.

Then look at your energy sources and see which will match the needs of each power group. Determine what size solar cell panels you will need to power all the items in each power group over a given time period.

Also consider matching the battery requirements for each power group to specific types of batteries. It may take some high-powered large batteries as well as mid-sized batteries or just one or two great big batteries to design a system that meets your personal needs.

Because today’s battery technology is changing quickly, make sure you evaluate all the different types of batteries and the most critical battery specifications. Things you should consider include battery discharge rate and level, the battery’s weight and the battery’s ampere-hour to weight ratio.

The latest batteries have low weight-to power ratios, much lower discharge rates, and can work at much lower discharge levels than your classical lead-acid batteries. And this means that the newer battery technologies may very well produce more reliable energy sources than antiquated lead-acid technology.

Marine boat supplies continue to flow from the idea desks of marine electronics companies. And one of the driving forces is solar technology. Every day there are more marine boat supplies that come complete, and that means complete with an energy supply that lasts forever.

Today you can readily find solar flashlights, solar lanterns, solar storing cases and solar traveling bags and tomorrow you can expect to find more solar devices, like solar stereos, solar GPS units and solar laptops.

However, because most people don’t want to leave their expensive electronic devices in the sun, the trend in boating is for boat companies to offer solar cell panels as built in options.

Whether you are considering a solar option for your boat or just wondering what solar power has to offer, like a reliable power back-up, you will want to consider not only what marine electronics come in solar versions, but all the different types of solar panels and batteries.

Because today’s solar panels come in flexible, rigid and foldup versions, you will first have to decide on what type will fit your needs the best. For that decision you should take into consideration not only the solar panel’s power rating, size and weight, but also the batteries that come along with it.

Ideally, you want batteries that offer the highest ampere-hour rating and the lowest weight. For solar panels it’s the same. But since solar panels are most often rated in watts instead of ampere-hours, you would want a solar panel that has the highest watt to weight ratio.

As a general rule of thumb, for any consistent use of your electronics devices, the solar panel’s power rating should at least equal the power requirements of the electronic devices you plan to use. For example, if you plan to have a 300 watt microwave on board, you would want a solar panel that has at least a 300 watt power rating. Although you could use a 30 watt panel, the end result would be a microwave that you couldn’t use very much.

What you have to remember on your solar panel search is that the watt ratings don’t tell the whole story. And that’s because you store the energy from your solar panel in a battery. That means you can save the energy that your solar panel generates to run high-wattage devices.

Because of the ability to save solar power in batteries it is necessary to calculate the amount of power your solar panel generates over time. If you have a 30 watt solar cell and if its receiving full sun 60 hours per week, it will generate 1800 watt-hours of energy per week. Here you just simply multiply the number of sun hours, 60, by the watt rating of your solar panel, 30, to obtain 1800 watt-hours.

This means that within a week, you will have saved enough power to run a 10 watt appliance for 180 hours, or a 100 watt appliance for 18 hours or even a 1000 watt appliance for 1.8 hours.

As a point of reference consider the power rating of your electronic devices that you plan to use and the power rating of any marine electronics before you buy. Consider also that your typical cell phones and portable GPS units consume from 1 to 5 watts when you are communicating and next to nothing when they’re off. Laptops, PCs, chartplotters and accessories such as satellite terminals will often easily consume 20 watts and up.

However, don’t forget that the power consumption of a device depends on what it’s doing. When just working on your PC word processor, you are consuming much less power than when you’re on the Internet. And that’s because downloading and uploading large files is power intensive. Just how power intensive depends on which way the information is going. Transmitting information can often require 3 or 4 times the power required for receiving

If you’re thinking that you want to bring all the conveniences of home onboard, consider first that appliances like dryers, refrigerators and water makers are big consumers of power, often in the order of thousands of watts.

But there is still hope. More and more high efficiency appliances are entering the market. The Spectra Watermachine, for example, from Spectra Watermakers, requires only 13 watt-hours per gallon. And that according to the company is “just 33% of the energy required by the best competitive technology.”

The new chartplotters, which are more like complete communication and navigation systems, not only have built in features that support AIS, sonar/fishfinder, radar and VHF distress, but they have it all within a 3D graphics and video framework.

To top it off, these chartplotters are a snap to integrate. Si-Tex has made it not only easy to integrate its products with its other marine gear, but also with the ever-growing array of NMEA compatible electronic devices.

Si-Tex’s latest chartplotters, known as the EC-series come in a variety of different screen sizes and options that will fit almost any budget. The top of the line version, the EC-11, features a 10.5 inch all-light display that is not only easy to read in the dark but also in the bright sunlight. Besides the high-resolution display, the chartplotter has all you need to quickly integrate together all of your real time sonar, AIS, and radar data with your navigational maps and charts.

The large screen and software that comes standard with the chartplotter not only let you pull up your own virtual instrument control panel, but also let you combine and overlay different display data onto different windows. With the window screen system, it’s just a push of a button to see your heading and what’s on radar, but also view what’s underwater and what’s coming at you on the AIS feed.

Giving you the heads up on emerging video navigation technology, the EC-11’s 3D and video view control is one feature that you’ll make good use of. And that’s because you can mark your video views right on the maps of your radar, sonar and AIS views; letting you see the actual seascape and coastline your navigation data maps to. Adding extra safety and fun, the chartplotter’s video ports and software makes it easy to not just feed in your own video waypoints, but also make them instantly view-accessible on your digital maps.

If you want even more video power, the EC-11 is ready for you. Because the chartplotter is NMEA compatible and video ready, you can readily hook up all the latest video technology, like video-based thermal imagers; allowing you to view stored daytime video waypoints and routes alongside real-time thermal video waypoints and routes.

What is also outstanding about the chartplotter line is not just the hundreds of features, such as man overboard alarms and the GPS/WAAS receiver, but the fact that it’s all so well-documented and well-supported.

Unlike other manufacturers, Si-Tex documentation covers all the basics and provides everything you need to know to configure your chartplotter exactly how you want it. And that means not only the ability to customize your screens with the exact data, graphics and video you want, but the ability to integrate your chartplotter with other Si-Tex and NMEA compatible devices.

Si-Tex, however, doesn’t leave its customer support at that. Their customer blog provides hundreds of tips for getting the most out of your navigation and communications equipment. And it does it all in a straightforward easy-to-understand manner.

All in all, the type of sailboat supplies you will need will depend on your sailboat and how you use your sailboat. However, even a day on the smallest sailboats can be improved with technology. Waterproof cell phones and GPS units, for example, will not only make short excursions on the lake safer, but also more carefree.

Besides a necessary safety device, your standard handheld GPS unit can also be a lot of fun on the water. Today’s electronically in-tune boaters often play geocaching games with their GPS units. In your typical geocaching game a treasure or prize is hidden at a known GPS location and the other players try to find it. There are as many varieties of the game as you can dream up. The classical game though involves giving the exact coordinates of the treasure and then providing clues near the treasure site, such as a hidden treasure map.

Other electronic gadgets for a smaller sailboat that can make sailing more relaxing include waterproof radios, CDs, cameras (both video and still), as well as your classic iPod. Although not all these devices can be found in waterproof versions, many are not only waterproof, but also float and work underwater.

Keeping the power on to all these devices used to be problematic. However, with a foldable solar panel or any one of the new portable wind and motion electricity generators you can forget about the batteries all together.

What’s even nicer though, is that your marine electronics combined often weigh just a few pounds, allowing you to carry it all in a single waterproof carrying case. But there’s even more. These carrying cases, which often float, give you even more power. And that’s because they come tiled from side-to-side with high-efficiency solar cells.

If you really want to be prepared for a sailing excursion you should also consider clothes. When you’re out on the boat, the weather can change quickly and you will need to be prepared. Advances in fabric technology continue to make sailing clothes lighter and ever more waterproof. All of this technology is driven by what has become known as smart textiles. Smart textiles have the capability to automatically change their fabric properties to fit a particular environment.

If you want to take extra care of your skin, consider the UPF rating of the sailing hats and clothes you buy. Clothes with high UPF ratings let very little ultraviolet rays in. Although for many this may not be that important, for others it is. And that’s because these clothes can help prevent more damage to already sunburnt skin.

Besides the clothes and electronics, other items you may want to pick up at your local boating supply store include games. There are many waterproof games that can be played on even the smallest of sailboats. Waterproof playing cards and some plastic poker chips are popular items that can do a lot to liven up even the smallest sailboat.