Thanks to my friends at Shine Micro, I was able to visit the exhibition booths at the big eNavigation conference today.
This is not a “trade show”; rather, it’s a conference where various waterways management stakeholders, public and private, meet with one another, and with industry representatives, to share ideas and collect feedback.
In other words, I was way out of my league! But I learned a lot, I met some interesting (and influential) people, and I saw an enormous jar full of Runts.
Among other highlights, I learned about the future of radar from Marc Pos of Honeywell Aerospace. Ben Ellison over at Panbo has already kicked off a discussion of Honeywell’s solid-state, pulse-compression radar. It appears to be impressive technology, even though I barely understand what it means! Suffice to say that in the near future, commercially available radar units will use a lot less power, will generate almost no harmful radiation, and will provide much higher-resolution imaging, at longer ranges. Sign me up!
Mark D. Wiggins of Alion Science & Technology told me about the potential of “artificial” or “synthetic” or “virtual” AIS. I wrote about it back in March of 2007. I don’t claim to be any sort of authority on this, of course, but I asked him to read over my article and let me know if I was on the right track at all.
And I finally got to meet Stephanie Nevarez of Shine Micro in person. They make a whole range of interesting AIS and MURS products, and I was glad to hear that they’re still planning to release my favorite Class B AIS form-factor: the RadarPlus SM162B, shown at right.
The whole unit, including GPS and AIS antennae, is housed in an 18-inch tube that mounts on any standard marine base. In a boat as small as Two Lucky Fish, I’m interested in this kind of “outside the box” (or should I say “outside the cabin”) solution.
There was lots more, but it’s late, and I’ve got to get a five-year-old to bed!
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