Anyone who has struggled with fishfinder plug and socket corrosion misery must have wondered if there is a better way. The answer surely lies in wireless technology and pulling data together on to one device and screen. Wired NMEA is supposed to achieve this and probably succeeds for those who can afford it. But what about small boat owners who don’t have the space or cash for the cabling and dedicated electronic gizmos that NMEA requires?
We all have smartphones or tablets of one kind or another. Some of us have spent extra on waterproof cases and have nautical GPS navigation apps like Navionics or iNavX already installed. What we also need is wireless access to what is going on under the boat and up in the air. Preferably from one waterproof electronic receiver processing the data from multiple sensors and then broadcasting it to whoever wants to receive it on their smart device.
A company called Vexilar moved in the right direction on fishfinder data in 2014, with a 12V fishfinder transducer and wifi transmitter which can display depth graphics on several smart devices at the same time. It can even share a split screen with the Navionics app. However, the hardware has received mixed reviews on reliability and the transmitter isn’t properly waterproof, which (given its target user) seems like a mistake. Perhaps for these reasons, it hasn’t really taken off.
Raymarine bought wireless instrument company Tacktick in 2011 but other than changing the logo, they have done very little with it. Tacktick’s expensive solar-powered wind transducer and wireless displays were great back in the day (I still use mine a lot) but surely the technology exists to send that wind data directly to a smartphone? If Raymarine weren’t jealously guarding the market share of their expensive wired NMEA boxes, they might have developed this branch of their technology. Other companies like Nasa and Garmin are finally pursuing wireless paths but most of it is much too expensive.
Netatmo have developed relatively low cost home weather devices that display a large range of variables on smart devices via WiFi but only by storing data on their remote internet servers. Boating needs someone to do something similar but without the need for internet servers - pull disparate wireless data together on the spot so that the whole lot can be displayed on one screen. My elderly iPad’s screen is already quite a bit larger than those of most proprietary free-standing fishfinders, so I would like to use that. I can only see two potential problems: keeping the smart device charged in the damp; and stopping touchscreens from having a nervous breakdown when they get wet, which can happen quite a lot on boats like ours.
At the moment it feels like we’re in the technology silo era of Betamax vs VHS, with companies slugging it out over their proprietary technologies, only to be overwhelmed by digital streaming. As I try to nurse my wired Garmin GPS/fishfinder back to life, the move to wireless can’t come soon enough for me.