electronics

The great AIS debate, and a bit of applied mariner's sense

There's quite a flurry of debate going on right now about automatic identification system (AIS) equipment. The question of the month is about who sees what: if you fit your boat with a class B AIS transponder, will big ships carrying class A equipment set their display filters to hide your much smaller vessel from their radar displays?

Situational awareness and electronics overload

It's hard not to be impressed by the latest round of navigation electronics. This is 2010, after all, an era in which the average desktop computer has the computing power to calculate the airflow around a Space Shuttle during re-entry, and we can't tell the difference between live and CGI actors on the cinema screen. I'm not convinced, though, that all this computing power is a good thing to be throwing at navigation systems- at least, not in the ways we see in some of the current crop of nav systems.

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