Following our recent round of the shows we have produced a shortlist of what is new and imminent for 2003. We have selected the following six products based on knowing these are products clients are waiting for and secondly if it is a genuinely new and exciting idea.
1. Sea Tel 4003 VSAT. Sea Tel should have their VSAT system available in 2003 first quarter. This consists of a 1m dish, equivalent to their 4094 sat TV radome, and the below deck equipment. The service will include voice over IP and data at 256MBps. The airtime cost is cheap at US$1,000 per month for 1 Gbyte of data. After crunching the numbers the airtime saving in the first year is equivalent to the cost of an Inmarsat Fleet 77. The downside is that it cannot be used worldwide. Usage is currently limited to the Med, east and west coasts of USA and Caribbean but no mid ocean coverage.
2. Triband Ericsson fixed GSM with voice, G3 fax and GPRS data. The first units are available now and being installed. This is the product that all yachts that do the ´milk run´ have been waiting for. A phone that will work in the US and Caribbean as well as all the standard GSM areas of the world. No need to change between GSM units and US cell phones anymore.
3. Head up navigation data display. At the recent Ft Lauderdale show one of the novel new bits of kit I saw was a head-up display for small day boats. The unit shines all the standard navigation data, which is reflected on the windscreen. The benefit is that you can see all the navigation data in front of your eyes as you look through the windscreen in broad daylight and at night. A colleague has picked up the distributorship for Europe and plans to develop it for large yachts.
4. Sony Vaio DVD TV recorder. A new standard product from Sony to fit alongside your TV in the sitting room. It contains large capacity hard disks and a DVD burner. You can copy TV programs to hard disk or burn a DVD.
5. Simrad large yacht sonar. Following the demise of America Pioneer there have only been two sonar players in the market for mid size vessels and both these are targeted at the fishing fleet market. However Simrad have extracted one of these products and enhanced it for the large yacht market using the ´black box´ approach that has been so successful for Furuno. Simrad also have some good looking and high quality VGA screens coming out in the new year.
6. Fleet F55 will become available at some point in 2003. This has only a 55cm dish as compared to the 77cm dish of the Fleet77. It has an almost identical specification to the 77, including voice, fax, data, ISDN data and MPDS data. It is somewhat smaller and uses the mini spot beams so it will not have the coverage of the 77.
By Roger Horner of E3 Systems