Category : Equipment

GNS 3000 Bluetooth GPS receiver for mobile [Update]

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The GNS 3000 to Global Navigation Systems is available since November 2022 (¹). It replaces GNS 2000 More. Now equipped with a Bluetooth transmitter 5.0, it has an SD Card slot for recording position data continuously.

Compatible with Apple products, It caters mainly to non-GPS devices : iPod Touch and iPad WiFi all models. It can also be used with all PDAs, Bluetooth phones and tablets. It has a Li-Ion battery offering an autonomy of 10 continuous hours.

[Update 15 May 2024] Warning : from iOS/iPadOS 17.x, a update of the device is essential. But it can only be done from an Android device.

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Which iPad for navigation ? [Update-13]

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Many of you ask me about choosing an iPad for boating use. Unfortunately having no time to respond to every request a post is required. Each year it is advisable to review this question, and sometimes more often.

With the presentation of the latest iPads on 7 May 2024, the chipset Apple M4 comes up on models iPad Pro 11″ and 13″, with 8 or 16 GB of RAM of RAM memory (depending on storage capacity). The’iPad 10 " low cost" price drop and’iPad Air 6 makes its entrance with a chip Apple M2 , 8 GB RAM and a screen 11″ diagonal. The big news is the appearance of a large iPad Air 13″ which complements iPad Pros with the same size. All of these devices are now built-in with the USB-C connector imposed by the European Union, and supplied with USB-C charger and cable. Read more …

iTabNav.fr always listening to browsers

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14 March 2011 – 14 March 2024, a birthday (¹) which does not fall round, but a performance worth saluting ! What was just a Startup in the early days of the use of tablets and smartphones in navigation is now a company with a long history (²). Dominique Gauthier, its founder and manager, has participated for more than ten years in securing our iPads by becoming the exclusive importer for France of the famous cases aiShell (Originally “iPad Case”). Designed and manufactured in Germany, Waterproof and robust properties that no longer need to be demonstrated, with a wide range of supports and accessories to meet all needs at sea. Read more …

Weather4D R&N and distance calculations

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Since the arrival of the ARM-based Mac (M1… M3…) and the system macOS 11 Big Sur, Weather4D Routing & Navigation runs natively on our favorite computers (¹). But this happy event was not going to, since then, without a few small restrictions. The most annoying one for users was, to date, loss of distance calculation. This is done on touch devices by a two-finger long press, there was no function to translate this gesture on Mac. The mouse has only one pointer, not two ! Read more …

NMEA OneNet® : A new standard for high-end communication

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20 years after NMEA 2000 and more than 40 years after NMEA0183, OneNet® is the third-generation NMEA standard for interfacing and networking marine data.

In development since 2010 by NMEA members (1), to be published in late 2021, the OneNet standard is based on the IP Internet Protocol (2) version 6 (IPv6) and runs on IEEE Ethernet LAN 802.3. This new standard is intended to combine the three NMEA data standards — OneNet, NMEA 2000, NMEA0183 — on a single local area network (LAN). Read more …

Nomad AIS transponder is back

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Appeared in spring 2017, the Nomad to Digital Yacht was the first, and the only one, portable AIS transponder. I carried out a detailed test the following summer, reported on this blog (¹). It had been feared that this excellent device would be discontinued, because it has been unavailable for several months, but not at all ! Right now it is reborn in a new and improved version : Nomad-2. Read more …

MacENCx64 finally offers global charting

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Since taking over MacENC at the end of the year 2020, become MacENCx64 (¹), it took three painstaking years for the company NavStation LLC to finalize the implementation of a global charting. Since January 1 2024 is now done. A long negotiation with the ENC charting distributor ChartWorld (²) has enabled the creation of a range of vector charts in ENC S-57/S-63 format (³) as in-app purchase. Read more …

Connecting USB/Bluetooth GPS with Mac M1 [Update-2]

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The arrival of Macs with Apple M1 processors and macOS systems 11 "Big Sur" and macOS 12 "Monterey" had caused disappointments among GPS users connected via USB and/or Bluetooth for their navigation applications..

In USB, Latest DriverProlific V.2.2.2 is now universal for GPS BU-353xx by GlobalSat. As for theGNS3000 (¹) in Bluetooth it always undergoes an instability of the interface for the connection of multiple devices, instability that unfortunately does not yet seem to be fully fixed. Read more …

XB-8000 new transponder AIS WiFi for mobile devices [Update]

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xb-8000Vesper Marine, company established in 2007 in Auckland (New Zealand), specializes in the design of devices for AIS data broadcasting. Their latest product, XB-8000, is a Class B AIS transponder certified NMEA2000® compact, low consumption, responding to the yachting market and small business units. It has essentially been designed with a view to WiFi transmission to navigation applications developed on tablets and smartphones.

[Updated] After the acquisition of Vesper Marine by Garmin, this device is discontinued since February 2023. The brand name is also removed.

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