Iridium Communications acquires Satelles

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Iridium to Expand its Reach as a Global Alternative PNT Service.„

This is how Iridium presents the acquisition of its partner Satelles. March, the 4 th 2024, Iridium Communications, strategic partner of the company Satelles of which it already owns 20% of capital, has announced its full acquisition, to become Iridium's "Satellite Time and Location" business unit. Iridium buys the 80% of capital remaining for approximately 115 million dollars (¹).

With this acquisition, Iridium aims to provide a PNT service (²) more robust and reliable than current GNSS networks (³). Read more …

Navionics Boating : Garmin updates charts and pricing… on the rise !

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As you might expect, Garmin cleaned up the offer and pricing of Navionics Boating charts at the beginning of the year 2024.

No more large areas (like the Mediterranean) down to 35 € ! Several zones are redefined and subscription prices are aligned uniformly with 50 € for most, with two exceptions. Read more …

El Niño weakening in the Pacific

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Following the prediction of an episode El Niño started in March 2023 (¹) and confirmed the following June (²), this climatic phenomenon of the Pacific Ocean, called ENSO (El Niño Southern Oscillation), strengthened until the end of December, early January 2024.

The February ENSO forecast developed by the U.S. Climate Prediction Center predicts that we are on the eve of an episode La Niña, even though the Pacific Ocean is still affected by the El Niño episode. According to the forecast, there is 79 % chance that El Niño will become neutral by April-June, and 55 % chance that the Pacific will return to ENSO La Niña between June and August.

Source : Tom Di Liberto – ENSO Blog / Climate.gov

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Weather4D R&N and distance calculations

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Since the arrival of ARM-based Mac (M1… M3…) and the system macOS 11 Big Sur, Weather4D Routage & Navigation works natively on our favorite computers (¹). But this happy event did not go, since then, without some small restrictions. The most annoying for users was, until this day, loss of distance calculation. This is carried out on touch devices by a two-finger long press, no function allowed the translation of this gesture on Mac. The mouse only has one pointer, not two ! Read more …

NMEA OneNet® : a new high-end communication standard

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

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 works on the IEEE Ethernet local network 802.3. This new standard aims to combine the three NMEA data standards — OneNet, NMEA 2000, NMEA0183 — on a single local 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). We feared that this excellent device would be abandoned, 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 it 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 …