You could look at that name and dread the day after Thanksgiving as the start of the Christmas shopping season or you could look at the bright side and consider it the day all the retail outlets get out of the red for the year.  For Garmin, it should be called green Friday.

Ben over at Panbo ran a nice piece on the introduction of Fleet Broadband.  As I was reading it a memo came across my desk from Stratos, the Global Satellite service provider, with all their details on providing airtime.

With the recent introduction of Furuno's FI50 Instruments, Garmin's new instruments and autopilots and the existing full lines available from Raymarine and Simrad, all the the players have aligned themselves with complete soup-to-nuts packages.

I've had a week to digest all the buzz from the Lauderdale Boat Show.  It's already clear that NavNet3D was the big winner at the show but the other breakout performance award should go to NMEA2000.

The name is all wrong now.  It should have been called NMEA 2010, then it would look ahead of it's time instead of woefully behind, but the fact is that it's here now and it's here to stay.  All the major manufacturers in electronics, engines, electrical systems and monitoring have either already embraced the protocol or have something in the works. 

I said that Furuno's new products had to be pretty damn Earth shattering to live up to the hype and secrecy floating around before Wednesday's grand introduction.

G-Series Command Center Keyboard

The G-Series command center keyboard is the main user interface control for for the entire navigation system. It will control multiple processor modules, meaning you will be able to switch between several radar units, entertainment screens or any combination of applications available. There is a nice LCD screen right on the controller so you can keep track of what you're doing at any given time.