On Apr 15, 9:09�am, Wayne.B wrote:
On 15 Apr 2007 07:44:01 -0700, "Chuck Gould"

wrote:
If the $500 "basic" setup is competitive with Nobeltec or Coastal
Navigator this company probably has a viable business plan. To spend
$5k, there would really have to be some special stuff in the upgrades.

They've been around for awhile and seem to be doing OK. *Their primary
market is commercial fisherman and high end recreational.

With a boat like yours, with a fully enclosed pilot house, you should
have no PC reliability issues at all. *Start off with a clean install
of fully patched Win2K or WinXP, and do *NOT* install anything else
that is not marine related. *Most PC reliability issues stem from junk
software of one sort or another.

Maybe it's the salt air; but I have noticed a difference in
reliability between the components aboard my boat that were originally
designed for a non-marine use and actual marine electronics. My AM/FM/
CD player is a case in point.
To be fair, I put it in in the early 90's but it's already starting to
fail. The darn thing has a "removeable face" and the power switch is
entirely contained within the face plate. The salt air environment has
corroded the contacts to the point where it takes an annoying amount
of "fiddling" to turn the stereo on or off. There is no access to the
backside of the switch so the most obvious solution, (taking a can of
contact cleaner to the corroded surfaces), is out of the question. I
really need a new stereo anyway- the present one is so old that it
won't read MP3 files off a disc burned in the home computer. I'm sort
of in a holding pattern in the music department for now as I still
need to adapt to listening to music out of some minipod and without
speakers. I'd be happy to continue feeding CD's into the present
unit's changer if it would simply turn on without pressing the switch
40 times and resorting to a questionable chant.

Perhaps it's my disappointing experience with the stereo, a series of
"junked" toasters, and other terrestrial appliances that inspire me to
be skeptcal of relying primarily on a household or office computer for
navigation.