Integrated Electronics and All Your Eggs in One Basket

[Chotu]

Originally Posted by Emmalina

Be interesting to see you do that through a coral reef !

Haven’t had the good fortune to travel that far with the new boat yet. No real reefs to speak of in the States. The few we do have, you just avoid or approach from known access points.

[rslifkin]

Originally Posted by Chotu

That’s funny. I don’t think I’ve ever had a working depth sounder. Ha ha ha.

Every damn boat I buy (or build) ends up having depth sounder issues. I’ve resigned myself to the fact that I’ll possibly never have this luxury. I’m 30 years into sailing and continuous boat ownership.

Been using a lead line on the boat I built because my epoxy mounting of the transducer in hull did not work out properly for some reason. Seriously. Ha ha.

Hearing that makes my eyes get bigger! Some people think I'm nuts, but at least with my own boat, I won't even move the boat the 300 feet from the lift pit to my slip in the spring without powering up the chartplotter to get a depth reading. On other people's boats, if they don't have a reliable depth reading, they're comfortable with that, and I know the area, I'm fine at the helm without a good reading. But I still don't like it.

[Chotu]

Originally Posted by rslifkin

Hearing that makes my eyes get bigger! Some people think I'm nuts, but at least with my own boat, I won't even move the boat the 300 feet from the lift pit to my slip in the spring without powering up the chartplotter to get a depth reading. On other people's boats, if they don't have a reliable depth reading, they're comfortable with that, and I know the area, I'm fine at the helm without a good reading. But I still don't like it.

I’m just very cautious with my courses rather than having a continuous depth readout. Plus drop a lead line from time to time in shallows.

So all those shortcuts you see people taking? Not me. I’m in the shipping lanes or out in other deep water.

Although, I’ve done the ICW from Miami to Virginia many times without a depth sounder. That’s pretty crazy stuff but I only touched the ground once in my life on boats. In the ICW. I was going around a dredging area with an active dredger working. Somehow, there was a pile of sand or something mid channel. Touched it, backed off it. Went around it slowly and continued on my way.

When you’re always in deep water, I find if you know where you are, you don’t so much need to know the depth from instruments.

Sorry to give you a heart attack. Ha ha.

[Rucksta]

Integrated Nav system on a single bus.
Independent power supply for communications.
Additional standalone VHF and GPS independent of the vessel power system.
Mounted magnetic compass and a magnetic hand bearing compass
Paper charts and plotting equipment.

Meets the requirements for a Cat 3 offshore safety certificate.

Some other common sense safety items are included in the Cat 6- Cat 3 audits including keel and rudder integrity checks (stability kicks in at Cat 2)

Check out the requirements at your national sailing authority.
The Ocean doesn't care if you are cruising or racing.

[Joh.Ghurt]

Originally Posted by rslifkin

Hearing that makes my eyes get bigger! Some people think I'm nuts, but at least with my own boat, I won't even move the boat the 300 feet from the lift pit to my slip in the spring without powering up the chartplotter to get a depth reading. On other people's boats, if they don't have a reliable depth reading, they're comfortable with that, and I know the area, I'm fine at the helm without a good reading. But I still don't like it.

Right now my depth-sounder stopped working after doing some unrelated cabling job and I haven't figured out why yet.
Should I stop sailing only because of this? Is it worth 400€ to replace it right now or can this wait till next scheduled haul-out?

As I'm sailing mostly in known areas without coral heads at the moment, this is more an annoyance than a catastrophe.

Having an old boat where not every system has been renovated or updated yet and some are prone to failures, one can learn to live without all those gadgets. Sure, they're nice, but 50 years ago, none of them existed and sailors were still sailing.

[goboatingnow]

These days integrated is KISS . I have a can bus running around , everything is connected to it. Any wiring failure must be associated with this cable. It’s also easy to isolate and connect a workaround cable.

Equally while my vhf is on the NMEA 2000 can bus , it has a stand-alone gps and can run itself

( I have a separate nmea 2000 GPS as well )

My chart plotter is fully integrated but has an integrated gps and can run without any interconnects

My autopilot can run without a network connection sure it can’t get routing but who cares.

My ST60s are all wired to their respective Senders ( I have a liking for the ST60 system )

Fully integrated. But equally capable of independent operation

People decrying integrated solutions don’t really understand the reality of modern systems

Not to mention three phones and two tablets with gps and charts and two garmin handhelds

[Paul L]

Originally Posted by Russian007

how does one safeguard a backup compass against lightning?

Haven't really thought about a backup mag compass. I guess you could put it in some sort of a Faraday cage. Although it would be hard to know if it was still accurate when you pulled it out.

[goboatingnow]

Originally Posted by Paul L

Haven't really thought about a backup mag compass. I guess you could put it in some sort of a Faraday cage. Although it would be hard to know if it was still accurate when you pulled it out.

Last time I looked sun still sets in the west and in the northern hemisphere Polaris is roughly where it’s always been.

[rslifkin]

Originally Posted by Paul L

Haven't really thought about a backup mag compass. I guess you could put it in some sort of a Faraday cage. Although it would be hard to know if it was still accurate when you pulled it out.

I'd worry more about having some form of backup GPS device that can be protected. If you've got a working GPS, you may not have a reliable heading indication, but you'll know where you are, and as long as you're moving, you'll know course over ground, so you'll know what direction you're going. And course over ground is computed based on the GPS signals, so if the GPS is working, CoG will be accurate.

[JBP]

Fancy integrated electronics are wonderful for convenience, efficiency, ease of use, etc. All your backup system really needs to do is get you to safety. If you cross oceans, that might mean backup self steering of some sort, backup compass, backup GPS, paper charts, etc. If you are coastal, it could be a simple as knowing where the nearest marina is along with where the sun rises and sets.

[C420sailor]

A few things.

Most don’t run their N2K backbone up the mast—I know I don’t. If my mast comes off, I lose wind, radar, VHF (which can be rigged), and the mast cam. That’s it.

I run N2K and Ethernet between my two chartplotters. I know some data is shared via both means. If I lose one chartplotter, I can use the other down below. If I lose Ethernet network, I can still share N2K data. If I lose N2K, I can share Ethernet data.

At the end of the day though? It doesn’t matter. I spent the vast majority of my life sailing and navigating with none of this. I still always sail (and fly) with paper backup. I can still navigate with plotter and dividers. I don’t need a wind instrument or even a vane—I can feel the breeze on my face and feel the boat and see what my sails are doing.

The diesel instruments...I don’t need them.

I see your point, but system failures in aviation are a whole different animal. If you lose absolutely everything in solid IMC to the deck, you’re pretty boned. If I lose all my instrumentation in the same weather on a boat? Not NEARLY as hairy.

[Bycrick]

Integration means different things to different people. Having all your "instruments" go to a single display makes you dependent on that display. Fortunately, displays are relatively cheap and easy to add to a network. Barring mechanical problems (corrosion), the network itself isn’t likely to fail. You can always disconnect a failed component. The plus side is it can save a lot of ongoing mental work. You don’t need to remember how many times a dead man can vote or whether this blotch on the radar is in the same place as the AIS target or the #27 buoy.

The reverse side of the argument is equally true. Completely separate components won’t interact when they fail, but you have to integrate all the data, all the time. When you get tired, or busy or lazy, it’s easy to make a mistake. The biggest problem, IMHO, is that people become complacent when things are all integrated. They gradually become accustomed to simply believing and trusting the machinery. They’re the ones who drive up an unplowed road in the winter snow, or off the end of a pier: the GPS told me to.

For me, I’ve got most of the fancy equipment and it’s all integrated. But I’ve navigated all my life the old fashioned way, can still do it if I need to, and make it a point to check the electronics against the real world every chance I get.

[Paul L]

Originally Posted by goboatingnow

Last time I looked sun still sets in the west and in the northern hemisphere Polaris is roughly where it’s always been.

So how accurately do you think you could create a compass correction table based on eyeballing the sunrise?

[Bycrick]

Integration means different things to different people. Having all your "instruments" go to a single display makes you dependent on that display. Fortunately, displays are relatively cheap and easy to add to a network. Barring mechanical problems (corrosion), the network itself isn’t likely to fail. You can always disconnect a failed component. The plus side is it can save a lot of ongoing mental work. You don’t need to remember how many times a dead man can vote or whether this blotch on the radar is in the same place as the AIS target or the #27 buoy.

The reverse side of the argument is equally true. Completely separate components won’t interact when they fail, but you have to integrate all the data, all the time. When you get tired, or busy or lazy, it’s easy to make a mistake. The biggest problem, IMHO, is that people become complacent when things are all integrated. They gradually become accustomed to simply believing and trusting the machinery. They’re the ones who drive up an unplowed road in the winter snow, or off the end of a pier: the GPS told me to.

For me, I’ve got most of the fancy equipment and it’s all integrated. But I’ve navigated all my life the old fashioned way, can still do it if I need to, and make it a point to check the electronics against the real world every chance I get.

[rwidman]

My "redundancy" is a tablet with Navionics.

Actually, my redundancy is probably my other plotter because I have one at each helm. Unfortunately, the one on the flybridge won't work if the other one fails because everything else runs through it. But I could move the flybridge plotter to the lower helm if that one failed and run the boat from there. Or with the tablet.