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viewer. Chartography, the sonar screen,
radar, thermal night vision — anything that
can be seen at the helm — can now be
viewed from the palm of your hand, anywhere onboard. But this conversation is not
all one-way. By putting Bluetooth to work,
you can also use your i-device to play music
on the boat’s stereo system. Controls similar
to those on the i-screen can be accessed via
the e7’s touch-screen, allowing you to play
and pause tracks, skip forward, or go backwards into your playlist.
Having Wi-Fi inside your little box o’
navigation also allows for some other interesting possibilities, which would’ve seemed
impossible just a few years ago. You can preplan trips and routes, for example, without
the need for a data card or computer program. Navionics Mobile can discuss matters
directly with the e7, thanks to its Plotter
Synch ability. Just do your planning at home
on your iPad or iPhone, bring it with you to
the boat, and your chartplotter will converse
with your chartography app to wirelessly
download the data.
SOUNDS GROOVY
The latest newly connected players in the
market are the FUSION stereos with their
FUSION-Link, new this fall. Here, a combination of connective technologies is at work,
but it’s a different combination: The stereo
interfaces with a wireless DHCP Ethernet
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router, auto-configures to the network, and
speaks with your smartphone (Apple or
Android) via a FUSION-Link mobile app,
allowing full control of your boat’s multi-zoned audio system from your phone.
Although the stereo may not be the
most important electronic item on your
boat, this use of app-applied technology is
growing in other ways, too. Would you like
to have some measure of control even when
you’re miles away from the boat? Check out
systems like Siren Marine, which provides a
monitoring and control interface with your
boat via an app (iPhone or Android) along
with the use of onboard sensors. You can
preset the app to send text messages to your
phone if problems like a low battery, high
bilge water, or a shore power failure occur.
You can even set it up so that your own boat
can “call” you if someone steals it — and its
GPS coordinates will pop up with a link to
Google Maps. And before calling the water-cops, you can talk right back to your boat
via the same app, and tell it to shut down
the engines.
You’ll soon also be able to give your
boat remote marching orders from anywhere
you have cell service, with a system called
EmpirBus NXT, an onboard digital switching
system that offers control via an app on your
phone — stay tuned.
Just a few decades ago, we had stand-
alone units. There would be a chartplotter,
fishfinder, and radar all taking up space at
the helm. We’d have to operate each sepa-
rately.
Lenny Rudow is the electronics editor
of BoatU.S. Magazine.
