Vesper Marine

How small the world has become...

noreply@blogger.com (Mike) — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 23:43:00 +0000

Take a look at this story on CKD Boats Blogg. This is a nice example how great service can be provided across multiple international borders with the help of a good shipping company and good communications throughout the entire supply chain, from production to end customer.

Welcome to Sydney Plastiki

noreply@blogger.com (Mike) — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 03:48:00 +0000

Another high profile user of WatchMate makes a successful journey. After 8,000 nautical miles at sea Plastiki arrives safe in to Sydney. When you get a chance take a look at the Plastiki website. They are certainly promoting some fresh thinking about how we deal with waste and their expedition philosophy sums this thinking up nicely.

WHAT’S THE PLASTIKI EXPEDITION PHILOSOPHY?

It’s about recognizing that waste is fundamentally a design flaw (it does not appear in nature)
It’s about re-thinking waste as a resource.
It’s about cyclical 'cradle-to-cradle’ philosophies rather than linear thinking when it comes to
how we design our world.
It’s about a better understanding of the lifecycle’s and materials used in our everyday lives.
It’s about being curious and open, being prepared to let go of assumptions in order to undertake
a new ‘Planet 2.0’ way of thinking and acting.
It’s about acknowledging that we don't have all the answers and that nobody is as smart as
everybody.
It’s about being collaborative and curious so to engage multiple perspectives, skills, opinions and
organizations.
It’s about constantly learning, unlearning and re-learning.
It’s about re-integrating back into the web of life by recognizing and reducing our human
fingerprints on the natural world.
It’s about moving on from just articulating the problems and inspiring action of the solutions.
It’s about encouraging the world to reduce, reuse, recycle and rethink more of the planets
natural resources.
It’s about delivering a spectacular global “Message in a Bottle”.

We wish the crew of Plastiki well. I'm sure that by having a WatchMate on board would remove one more navigational stress for the crew. By the way if you haven't see the latest AIS WatchMate RX yet this page is a great place to start.

Standard Horizon Matrix GX2100 combined with an AIS WatchMate

noreply@blogger.com (Mike) — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 22:28:00 +0000

We have been hearing some great comments lately about how the AIS WatchMate 650 Display is a fantastic complement for the Standard Horizon Matrix GX2100 VHF radio for those skippers who need just a bit more out of their AIS displays.

The GX2100 does have its own very small AIS display but if you get the chance to see the WatchMate working alongside it as a dedicated AIS collision avoidance system you will immediately understand why people want to combine the products. The WatchMate increases the number of targets you can view and being a dedicated AIS system managing things like alarms, filtering out low priority targets and setting up profiles relevant for your location (ie Anchored, Harbor, Coastal, Offshore) is very very simple to achieve.

Connecting the two devices together is also straight forward, as can be seen here. The power consumption of the WatchMate is so low (1.2watts) it can be left on without being a major drain on you batteries.

Sanctuary Cove Boat Show

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff Robbins) — Mon, 31 May 2010 20:14:00 +0000

I just got back from the Sanctuary Cove Boat Show in Australia. We demonstrated the WatchMate and WatchMate-RX in the Vesper Marine booth and attracted a lot of attention. A number of existing WatchMate owners also came by to visit and thank us for the product or our service. That always feels nice.

That's Tony from Aquatronics on the right in the photo above. He is demonstrating a WatchMate-RX. Tony also made a short video of me introducing some of the basic features.

Can ships turn off Class B AIS Targets?

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff Robbins) — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 02:42:00 +0000

There's been a myth circulating for some time that ships "turn off" Class B targets. I see it pop up now and then and occasionally a customer asks me about it. Recently someone even posted that ships have a big red IGNORE CLASS B button to declutter their displays. That's nonsense.

Ship's captains don't want to hit small vessels! The COLREGS are clear that all means to avoid collision must be employed. I mean, imagine a ship's captain in court after running down a small boat and saying he "turned them off".

Even industry people are promulgating this myth. As reported here, a tech support person at Simrad said "It is normal for Class A units not to be able to communicate with Class B units". This has since been clarified by Simrad of course.

This misinformation is very frustrating because the AIS system was designed for interoperability. Class A and Class B were carefully designed to work together. It's true that older Class A equipment, produced before the Class B standards were created, may not be able to display the name and size of a Class B target, but they still "see" the target and it's position reports. They will still have CPA and TCPA.

There's an excellent discussion about all of this here and it also talks about whether the 30 second reporting rate of Class B poses a significant problem. I'm sure there will be debate about it, but in our local waters, the Auckland Harbourmaster did a study of this last year. They tested a Class B unit on a reasonably fast ferry (26 knots) and determined that even on a vessel of that speed it did not pose a significant safety or reporting issue. He since went on to change the requirement to allow either Class A or Class B on the ferries. In my own experience navigating among, those now Class B equipped, ferries I do not see much "zig zagging". The ferries here must change course frequently to avoid recreational boats, yet their Class B data appears quite steady to me. Of course at that speed it isn't a continuous track but it isn't erratic and is easy to interpret. More importantly, CPA alarms work fine.

In the same Panbo article there is a fair bit of discussion about filtering of targets. This is something we have focussed a lot of attention in our products. An alarm that rings all the time is just going to be turned off and be of little use when it's really needed.

In the comments to the blog entry above, Ben Ellison from Panbo writes "I thoroughly agree with you about AIS alarms. I think every manufacturer has a ways to go to get them right, often a long ways. I hope every developer takes a good look at what Vesper Marine is doing. They are a tiny company, but almost entirely focused on AIS plotting and alarming.

For instance, the Vesper WatchMate not only has an alarm filter based on target speed but also one based on your own vessel speed. So if, say, you slow way down and maneuver around while landing a fish, you won't get bothered by CPA alarms that aren't actually meaningful. Vesper also supports profiles so you can have different alarm set ups for fishing, offshore, harbor, etc"

But people do need to understand the implications of target filters. In our products we have two schemes. One is used to suppress alarms and the other to filter (or declutter) the display. Naturally, if you disable the alarm for a particular scenario then you won't get a warning if that situation unfolds. We've tried to make it very easy for people to understand and give them the controls needed as well as simple ways (we call them profiles) for people to switch them on and off.

WatchMate Animated Videos

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff Robbins) — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 04:21:00 +0000

We've been working on videos to demonstrate some of the key elements of our WatchMate products. It's been a challenge and great fun although I never thought I'd become the director of an animated film! Of course it's not Avatar, but I'm still quite proud of how it's come out. I hope it conveys the basic idea behind WatchMate and you enjoy it. Check it out at www.vespermarine.com and let me know what you think.

The next video we're working on shows how our filtering and prioritizing works. Stay tuned....

WatchMate as a GPS Repeater

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff Robbins) — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 23:51:00 +0000

All Class B AIS transponders include a built-in GPS but it's essentially useless to you unless you can display the information from it. So it of course makes sense to have the AIS WatchMate display your GPS position, course and speed. It has always routed this information out it's NMEA port for connection with other displays or a computer, but up until recently it didn't display it directly on its own screen.

A few customers have also suggested this too, so it's now there....

This means you don't have to switch on another GPS, chart plotter or computer to get your current navigation information. A real nice thing when power consumption is important. It also allows you to use the transponder's built-in GPS as your primary GPS rather than a secondary one.

If you've got an AIS WatchMate and want this feature, you can upgrade the firmware. To do this, visit the upgrades section our website.

Note: The WatchMate-RX has always had this feature.

Using a WatchMate with ICOM DSC Radios

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff Robbins) — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 21:49:00 +0000

I recently learned that several very widely used ICOM VHF and HF radios with DSC only accept a NMEA GGA sentence and they don't accept the standard RMC sentence that is put out by class B transponders. Unfortunately, class B transponders don't provide the GGA sentence that the ICOM requires.

This means when you are using a class B transponder as your source of GPS data, you can't also use it to feed your position to your ICOM DSC radio. That's too bad because it makes perfect sense to do this. You'll have the transponder on all the time and it has a GPS inside. Being able to also use the single-button distress feature of these DSC radios would be excellent.

So, we did a little experimenting and found that we can have a WatchMate do this for you. So starting in V3.15 of the firmware, if a GGA sentence is not found in the input stream, the WatchMate will generate one and place it in the output stream along with all the other GPS and AIS sentences. With this you can connect your DSC radio directly to the output of the WatchMate and the transponder will happily feed them both!

Getting started

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff Robbins) — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 21:23:00 +0000

I've created this blog to share some of the things we're working on at Vesper Marine. Please give me your feedback and comments. And as always, I love getting your suggestions for things we can do better. I am passionate about making marine safety products as easy to use as possible and always looking for ways we can enhance our products to better meet your needs.