TAKING A
BEARING
MEL BARTLETT: Phone a friend
Have you heard the one about
the man who dialled 999 and
demanded the police arrest his
girlfriend’s cat because it had
eaten his bacon? The one whose
snowman melted? Or the one
who complained a prostitute
he’d booked wasn’t pretty enough?
Just in case you think I’m being
sexist by singling out men, of
course women can be just as daft.
Domestic pets still feature, like the
hamster that prompted one lady
to call for an ambulance because
it had bitten her finger, or the
goldfish that “might be drowning.”
What set me off on my trawl
through the shallow waters of
human stupidity was enduring a
day of VHF chatter on the Solent.
The Coastguard handled the
endless succession of “radio
checks” with the ease that comes
of much practice. I couldn’t help
admiring the reply: “Ah yes, good
morning again, sir! We are still
receiving you loud and clear.”
There was just enough emphasis
on ‘again’ and ‘still’ to let a subtle
reproach show through the
veneer of professional courtesy.
But the one that almost made
me fall off my seat was, “Yes sir,
your signal is good but you are
barely readable,” in reply to a
caller who had a particularly rich,
plummy voice, and for whom the
sun had obviously been well over
the yard-arm for quite some time.His voice, crackling over the
airwaves, reminded me irresistibly
of the famous BBC ‘wireless’
broadcast about a naval fleet
review, made by a retired naval
officer sometime in the 1930s.
“The whole fleet is lit up,” he
began.“I mean lit up by fairy
lamps. It’s fantastic, it isn’t the
fleet at all. It’s just... it’s fairyland,
the whole fleet is in fairyland.”
Listening to it on YouTube, it’s
pretty obvious that it wasn’t just
the fleet that was lit up and away
with the fairies.
Meanwhile, I could still hear
Coastie responding to the endless
stream of “radio checks” and
occasionally butting in to make
a call of his own. In one, he asked
rather plaintively whether anyone
knew the name of the yacht
aground on Hamble Spit.
Curiously, none of those
people who had just tested
their fully functioning radios
seemed able to hear him –
or if they could, they weren’t
letting on.
Just because there’s a
proword for a radio check,
doesn’t mean you have to
use it. It’s fine, if you have
reason to think your radio
might not work, or if you’ve
just replaced an aerial or its
cable. But you wouldn’t call
the police just to ask if your
phone is working, would you?High-defi nition 16in screen allows you to display four different images at onceLowrance HDS-16 Carbon
Lowrance has introduced its biggest
ever MFD – a 16in addition to its
premier-league Carbon range –
which offers the equivalent of four
7in MFDs in a single unit.
The new unit boasts a bright,
high-definition 1,920x1,080-pixel
SolarMAX display, which promises
wide viewing angles and good
visibility, even in bright sunlight or
when wearing polarised sunglasses.
It almost goes without saying,
nowadays, that a flagship model
boasts a multitouch (pinch-to-zoom)
touchscreen control system, but
it’s backed up with a small but
adequate push-button panel. Push-
button control may be slightly more
cumbersome than touchscreen, but
offers far more precise control and
far fewer accidental keystrokes than
trying to operate a touchscreen on
a moving boat.
Behind the screen, there’s a built-
in GPS, a dual-core processor that
provides the computing power
required to run several functions
simultaneously, including Radar,
C-Map and Navionics chartplotting,
and six different kinds of sonar!
As one might expect from a brand
whose roots are in fishfinders and
whose main market is American-style
sportsfishing, it’s the sonar functions
that are most impressive.
As well as CHIRP and broadband
sonar, which produce clear but pretty
conventional-looking fishfinder
images, the built-in sonar function
offers high-frequency StructureScan,
which opens the door to far more
exciting and informative views of
what is going on under the keel.DownScan produces what is
effectively a high-resolution version
of the conventional sonar picture:
it’s not as good at showing up
individual fish, but far better at
revealing the details of underwater
features.
SideScan reveals features that lie
on each side of the boat, making it
much easier to locate the rocks and
wrecks that are most likely to attract
fish, or to check out an anchorage for
possible hazards.
StructureScan 3D takes SideScan
a step further by using the SideScan
data to build up a three-dimensional
‘model’ of the sea bed that can be
panned, tilted and twisted to view
the overall shape of the underwater
landscape from almost any angle.
Meanwhile, StructureMap could
be seen as a ‘sideways’ step in that
it overlays the SideScan image on
to a chart, making it easier to relate
the detailed but relatively narrow
view of the world revealed by sonar
to the much bigger picture presented
by a navigational chart.
It has to be said that none of these
are particularly ‘new’: StructureScan
was launched in 2012, and even
StructureScan 3D has been around
for a couple of years. What is new,
and exciting, though, is being able
to see all of them simultaneously
on a single screen.
Of course, there’s a price to pay- you can expect to fork out about
£4,000 for the HDS-16 Carbon
display alone, plus extra for the
sonar transducer(s), radar scanner,
and cartography.
Contact http://www.lowrance.com
This new MFD is
on our radar
NEWTECH BOAT MASTERPhoto
: Chris Howes/Wild Places Photography / Alamy