Just curious: Is radar something you would like to add at some point, or is it that you have found AIS by itself adequate for your needs?Threading through there in morning fog I'm pretty glad they're blasting their AIS signal. Really helps since I don't have radar.
Is your plotter a Garmin? I'm guessing maybe not, based on something else you said in that post. But if it is, you might be interested to know that a relatively recent release of their software (for a number of their plotters) added an "Always Off" option for the alarms. Otherwise, turning off the alarms would only hold until the next time you turned on the unit. I just flashed mine with the latest software and it works!I've had to turn off the AIS alarms on my chartplotter. With the result that I get an alarm saying that the alarms are off.
I just wanted to add this comment to my own post as a kind of addendum.I got down to the boat yesterday and wired my GX2200 into my Garmin 546S. It was very simple to do.
Why thank you, Loren! No calls from the bomb squad yet--though I myself have been tempted to blow up a fair number of electronic gadgets that didn't play nice.Alan, when the bomb squad cannot determine whether to cut the red or the green wire first, I bet they call you!
(I can sometimes empathize w/the the guy that had trouble pouring water out of a boot when the instructions were written on the heel...)
I just wanted to add this comment to my own post as a kind of addendum.
Although wiring the GX2200 to the Garmin 546S was indeed trivial, unfortunately I did so based on instructions I found on a website that contained an error. The mistake was subtle enough so that it was not immediately obvious. The AIS targets showed up just fine and the radio worked. I shut everything down and called it good. But later I began to notice some noise on the VHF that seemed unusual. It turns out that there was a wiring error in those particular instructions that led to this problem.
For anyone interested in connecting your GX2200 to a Garmin GPS, please see my detailed post on SBO about this. The wiring I discuss there definitely applies to the GPS546 and to most if not all Garmins of that vintage. For all I know it may apply to current models as well, but you would need to confirm that for yourself.
Thank you for sharing this with us, Loren.An AIS report of a collision in a very crowded area.
Collision: Call for Review of Navigation Status Fields in AIS
The U.K. Marine Accident Investigation Branch (MAIB) has released its report into the collision betw...maritime-executive.com
Probably the local ship traffic is not this crowded at the mouth of the Columbia River or in the Straits, but the conclusions of the investigation are a bit concerning.