Wireless Energy Making Boats Lighter and Safer

Wireless energy is the next step forward for informed boaters. Boaters who want a safer boat, a boat that moves quicker and a boat that’s not cluttered, are moving to wireless instrumentation systems, wireless switches and wireless displays. The latest wireless instruments use just a fraction of the power that older ones do, and the new wireless transmitters no longer require that you ever install batteries.

TackTick (Hampshire, England) and a number of other companies such as EnOcean (Oberhaching, Germany) are two companies that have operations in the wireless boat market.

TackTick not only supplies one of the largest selections of micropower wireless marine instruments, but also provides complete wireless retrofitting services for wired boats. Even if you have a completely wired navigation system in place, TickTack has a solar powered wireless solution to replace it. That means your chartplotters, PCs, displays, transducers, GPS systems, autopilots and weather instrumentation can still be used. And they all can be used with TackTick ’s complete line of wireless instruments.

Through the use of its NMEA interface, TackTick does more than simply retrofit your boat for wireless. The company optimally retrofits. And that means once retrofitted, your boat will move more swiftly, have more stability and will be much easier to navigate. To accomplish this, TackTick, besides relying on its vast experience in the high-speed sailing industry, determines the most ergonomic placement of instruments for maximum usability and maximum boat stability. The result is that instruments are where you need them, when you need them.

TackTick has an extensive history in the marine electronics market. Its credits include the first solar powered electronic compass. Not stopping there, they moved on to developing a wider range of wireless marine instruments. Today they offer a wide range of wireless display devices that rotate a wide range of navigation data and sensor data in both text and graphic formats. Further down the stream, TackTick won the prestigious Queen’s Award for Innovation for their wireless Micronet technology,

The impact of TackTick’s philosophy, which is a vision of a world of micropowered wireless solar instruments, has not gone unnoticed. In April of 2009, Suunto (Vantaa, Finland) one of the leading manufacturers of sports precision instruments and its affiliate Amer Sports Group (Garching, Germany), one of the largest sporting equipment companies with leading brands such as Salomon, Wilson, Precor, Atomic, Suunto, Mavic and Arc’teryx, acquired TackTick.

The acquisition of TackTick is expected to bring further advancements in portable wireless instruments. And that’s because Suunto, founded in the 1930s, has a strong engineering background, which has made it a leader in precision marine instruments such as precision compasses.

EnOcean also brings wireless energy to the boating world, but unlike micropowered solar devices and low-power LCD display technology, EnOcean uses microenergy sensing technology to convert kinetic energy to electrical energy.

With this technology, the everyday vibrations on your boat are stored and locked away in batteries that never have to be recharged. And these batteries power touch-enabled wireless transmitters that turn on and light switches and dimmers. But not only that, through EnOcean and its large base of alliance members, you can have custom boat control systems built, like alternative energy control systems.