Trawler Lifestyle | PassageMaker Magazine & Events

If you’re like most cruisers, you’d like to be able to watch television while under way or at anchor using one of the major satellite networks—DirecTV or Dish, for instance. Many folks fall into a familiar routine of watching the news over a cup of coffee in the morning or a current-events program on Sunday evenings. Taking this capability to sea with you only enhances these experiences. Additionally, in our communication- and information-intensive society, you’d also like to stay in touch with family or business associates via voice, email, and maybe even fax, while you are cruising. Finally, you think, it sure would be nice to have a high-speed Internet connection while you are away from home, for everything from the latest weather forecasts and repair facility details to technical information on equipment and stock market reports and, of course, just plain Web surfing. All this capability will, you’d assume, require a host of different products from myriad manufacturers and service providers using a sea of antennas, if it’s even possible at all, right? If you made this assumption, you’d be dead wrong. A company called KVH provides all of these capabilities—and one-stop shopping for the various service providers—using just two antennas.

It is always amazing to me how quickly marine electronics evolve. It seems that at every boat show there is something new, something better-while at the same time, feature after feature goes from "the latest" to obsolescence in what feels like months.

For the past year, we have been bombarded with press releases about new gear of interest to the cruising boat owner. One example is C-Map's new Max cartography, which offers a level of contentrich chart information that promises to raise the bar in the pilothouse. Several layers of information provide a range from basic navigation charting to an overload of marine facility phone numbers, land and road details, bridge details, and all sorts of other data combined into a region's single NT card.