Converters and Connectors Round Out the Expenses
Although wireless systems have gradually made their way aboard modern cruising boats, hard-wiring remains an essential part of most systems, especially when you are...
Preventing Electric Shock at the Dock
The human body runs on electricity and if you overload the nervous system with an external field, everything goes haywire. Every year several people...
Wireless Boat Monitoring
Most of us spend a great deal of time away from our boat. Whether shes on the hard, moored in our home harbor or...
Deck-level Wind Vanes
There are two primary wind indicators on a sailboat. First, we watch the sails. Sailing to windward we watch the jib for luffing and...
Crimping and Sealing for a Life Offshore
Mast antennas, like all electrical components, are particularly vulnerable to water intrusion at connectors. In the extreme, corrosion at unions or terminals can damage...
Special Report: How to Prevent AIS and VHF Antenna Malfunction
Allowing sailors to track nearby shipping traffic and to continuously broadcast their own boats position, the automatic identification system (AIS) transceivers available today have...
Register Your VHF Radio
The U.S. Coast Guard continues be concerned about the misuse (or lack of use) of VHF radios for distress calling. Many boaters, it seems,...
Testing VHF Coaxial
The loss in RF coaxial cable increases substantially and quickly, when there is water intrusion. Coax that uses foam dielectric, like RG8X and LMR...
Antenna Gain and VHF Transmission Range
Recreational marine VHF antennas are usually broken down into three categories: 3- and 4-foot sailboat antennas (3dB gain), 8-foot powerboat antennas (6 dB gain)...
Heat-Seal Connectors
A typical cruising boat has thousands of electrical connections. The consequence of failure range from a light that doesn't work to a fire that...
The Great Loop – The Basics
Join us this week as we discuss taking a sailboat around North America's great boating adventure - The Great Loop. We discuss advice from...
