SSB receivers.

A fellow Whitby owner asked a question about SSB receivers. While my ultimate choice for long distance cruising communications is an Icom M802, I have to accept that this is a $2K+ investment which may be overkill for the US East Coast and the Bahamas. 

My short term solution, and one that I had on my last boat, is a Sitex Nav-Fax 200 SSB receiver. (Search around as prices vary a lot). 

This worked very well for listening to Chris Parker and his predecessor David Jones. I also used it to download weather faxes onto a laptop with varying degrees of success. An interesting development is the availability of iPad apps to download weather faxes from the SSB receiver. I have not used this yet but it looks promising;

Blackcatsystems.com 

BEP CZone distributed power and digital switching systems

Check out this article by Ben Ellison on his excellent blog PANBO.com. 

PANBO

As you might know I have Mastervolt not BEP on TIH, but the good news is that they are both owned by the same parent company.  Mastervolt (BEP) has designed a connect switch to allow its systems to be controlled/monitored by the BEP system, this includes the Simrad MFDs'.

Check this out;  CZone Digital Switching on Simrad NSE

It looks like they will be working with other MFD companies (Garmin?) in the near future.

What does this mean?  I can monitor my MV DC system from the GPS (MFD) screen, switch on and off Nav lights, pumps etc. and other good stuff that I will probably never use.I believe that an iPad app is on the cards.

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