Luxury Yacht & Speed Boat

Perhaps you’ve noticed, as I have, that one of the features particularly intrig­uing to many electronics shoppers these days are those slick virtual engine-gauge screens you can pull up on many a multifunction display (MFD). Never mind for a moment that most of those MFDs can’t yet connect to many engine models; instead, imagine how those screens would look if you ran a company that makes umpteen real ma­rine engine gauges every year.

Many of its current gauges—there are some 10,000 models if you count all the available colors and the various brand names they’re sold un­der—feature a little data LCD in addi­tion to a traditional pin and dial. Moreover, the company’s MG2000 sys­tem includes a powerful microprocessor that’s built into a gauge: like casing and able to talk with all sorts of engine con­trol modules (ECMs), then mix the data with other inputs to do calculations like fuel flow, and finally rebroadcast every­thing to a network of less-intelligent gauges.

Which is how I came to be sitting in an I860’s building checking out an elabo­rate, do-everything, touch-screen graph­ical user interface (GUI). ‘Maestro earned its name because this PC-based system is intended to let its user conduct most every imaginable helm function. Picture not just full virtual engine gaug­es and charting with radar overlay and fish finder, but also quad cameras, con­trol of and other equipment, even e-mail and Web browsing. The Maestro project is ambitious, but there are nu­merous reasons to believe that.

Thus Maestro looks and feels a lot like Maptech’s current fourth-generation i3 system, not to men­tion the Sea Ray -Navigator it also pro­duces. That’s good, as over the years Maptech has come a long Way toward making fingertip navigation elegantly easy. And I say that based not just on the demo, but also some real finger-on time trying Maestro’s prototype software loaded into a touch-screen tablet com­puter.

In tall-windowed rooms first used by those uniform seam­stresses, I saw everything from metal lathes and dial printers to circuit board populators, all in action. And it’s ISO 9001 and Gold U.S. military supplier certifica­tions suggest it knows how to make things well.

At any rate, the hardware side of Mae­stro looks good. A custom aluminum casing means the separate processing unit stays cool without fans, and all sorts of connectivity is built in, including a Wi­Fi radio and a PCMCIA slot meant for a high-speed cellular data card. The $8,000 base system includes one sun­light-viewable 12-inch touch screen but will support a second touch screen as well as output via S-video to an onboard TV screen.

The compa­ny claims that its smart products like the MG2000 and Maestro can understand not just ECMs that speak in NMEA 2000, SmartCraft, and J1939 but also J1587, ALDL, and ISO 9141 K-Line. Frankly, I’d never heard of the latter three before, and I think that a number of marine electronics developers are just learning about them, too.

And Maestro is not only significant new product. Antares is a 3.8-inch color dis­play that will bring much of this same digital engine infor­mation to small boats, includ­ing fuel management and even remote control of Jensen Marine stereos. It will first be seen as an OEM product, but expects to re­tail it for retrofits eventually.

Meanwhile, the company has also been developing a series of WatchDog communications products, and the latest 750 model is turning heads. While currently targeted at commercial fisheries, its ability to combine Iridium satellite, GSM cellular, and GPS to provide reliable yet reason­ably priced global tracking, monitoring, and messaging has attracted the interest of serious cruisers.

So, should you happen to boat up the Thames this summer, look for that old factory clinging to the western hank about ten miles north of Long Island Sound?  ’While many of the big marine- electronics brands we all know are con­glomerating (Northstar and Navman recently joined Simrad and Lowrance under the Navico umbrella, for exam­ple), a new one may be coming to life in the little Yankee town of Uncasville.