As far as wireless it's a work in maritime progress. There WAM wireless VHF microphones are already there on high end VHF radios. But the marine electronics industry does have a way to go. BTW - I hate Blue Tooth too. Wi FI- I'm not too jaded by and am hopeful.
I also agree with that being locked into only one brand because they often do not interface with other manufacturers. Like my ICOM VHF interfaces with my Garmin GPS via an industry standard NMEA for DSC and distress calling.
The one unspoken advantage of networking is centralization- there is only one monitor needed for radar/FF/plotter-GPS. And it can be a bigger monitor at that, since you have more room at the console without three separate monitors/displays.
One tow boat I run, has that all in a single Garmin system of radar/FF/GPS-Plotter. I have to admit that it's nice with a 10 inch LCG monitor. However, I'm not quite sure if the radar is totally off when not in use though. Many radar units( JRC, Raytheon,etc.) have a low power stand-by mode when turned on for the radar dome/open array transmitter. That low power standby mode is much lower battery draw than actual radar xmit mode. But this standby mode does noticeably drain the batteries when the boat's engines are off.
The flip side of centralization and networking is that one monitor now becomes a single point of failure for EVERYTHING. You can live without a fishfinder but do need the GPS to get back home sometimes. Then it gets back to dead reckoning navigation skills. You do have a compass right?
Capt. Frank
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Originally Posted by mboy
I would take cable networked electronics ANY DAY over wireless (especially blue tooth).
Blue tooth is pretty old and never caught on the way the designers had hoped (mainly because it can be disrupted by a garage door opener and the range is not that great).
Basically relegated to cellphone head pieces and an afterthought in laptops for file transfer.
No one really converts to wifi to gain speed or reliability. Purely convenience
Since cable runs on a boat are not very long, I would NEVER trade the reliability of a cable for the slight convenience of wireless for my boat electronics inter communications.
Even if they ever do come out with wireless networked electronics for boats, you are a few generations away from them implementing it as networked is relatively in it's early stages.
That being said, I would not be concerned with networked electronics UNLESS they were a non proprietary type system like NMEA 2000 as proprietary gets you locked into 1 brand of hardware.
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