Arghhhhh. Lawyers......

[anchorclanker]

How many have walked into a Law Library, and noted the State and US Federal code sections. Laws and laws and laws, and then more laws. You have heard ignorance of the law is no excuse, so you are supposed to know all those laws.

But it doesn't end there. You no more than get past the federal section, thinking you've escaped, and find yourself in State codes and statutes. Anything the Feds couldnt think up, the State has. The state section is just as ponderous as the US code section. US code takes up a floor to ceiling book shelf thats about 5 feet wide. The equivalent of maybe a dozen full sets of Encyclopedias. The state section is just as large.

If you dont believe Lawyers are responsible for writing all that law, who do you think is? They have made it so overwhelming that not only cant a common man consider it, but it has surpassed Lawyers ability to fully comprehend it, even with computers.

 

[kenn]

I am completely certain that if we took the time to verify the ultimate result of silly claims filed -- we would clearly conclude that silly claims simply do not succeed. I am not yet willing to accept the idea that a ‘stupid’ claim could possibly explain any manufacturer‘s engineering design decision concerning radar/GPS overlay.

The point is not so much that 'silly' claims regularly succeed, it's that silly claims are successfully filed and must be pursued and either contested or settled, at significant expense. When you are a manufacturer with a product and one person comes up with a plausible claim, you then either get copycats or a class action against you.

 

[Stu Jackson]

I always thought the legislature wrote laws, not lawyers.

 

[Stu Jackson]

Actually we do know how it ended. I made a stink about this on-line, Ben of Panbo got involved as did the owner of Marine Installers Rant Blog and it spread to the installer community as well as DIY. Raymarine got wind of the bad press and now they are reportedly going to return the ability for COG and radar overlay as early as this fall with software updates...

No one has been able to get the specifics of the case but I know they are searching....

Maine Sail, good for you and Ben and the others. And thanks from a grateful community.

 

[Freedom77]

I am curious as to how the Supreme Court has managed to "interpret" and foul up the Bill of Rights so completely. Ten little sentences has turned into Cluster F--- and depending on who is in there it can be reversed. Jus' Sayin'

 

[Jackdaw]

Maine,

I ran into this issue this spring, when adding a dual Lowrance plotter setup with 4G radar for our 36.7. As you report, I needed an external heading sensor to make it work. Happily my Raymarine Smartpilot has a fluxgate compass, and the smartpilot can output that data at 10hz over NMEA-0183. One $50 NMEA0183-simnet converter cable later, I'm sorted out.

But I'm OK with the idea in general. Do you not agree that the basic part of their rationale, that a boats heading and COG bearing can differ by several degrees? I can plot heading and course lines at the same time. Its interesting to watch how far they are sometimes off.

 

[Maine Sail]

On paper I would agree. The problem is we don't, and our boats don't live in the "on paper" or in the "lab" world, we live in the real world. I work in the real world I am on lots of boats and I have yet to see a single vessel that had a fluxgate sensor agree with the ships main compass on all points of sail. One of my customers is a professional compass adjuster, he sees the same thing. Some are off by as much as 10-15 degrees no matter how much you try to calibrate them.

What about magnetic disturbances? We have plenty of those along this coast... To take away GPS data because the chart could yaw away from the targets is a Band-Aid where one does not belong if the replacement is a fluxgate.. Neither heading data is perfect. Anyone who thinks it is is fooling themselves...

There is no perfect heading sensor unless you spend lots of money to get one. What they want you to use is a poor excuse for heading data, IMHO, on the vast majority of boats out there. Yesterday I had to replace a flux gate and found it less than 2' from a subwoofer, not doing overlay with that heading sensor.........

I feel fluxgate heading sensors are soooo poorly accurate, on the vast majority of boats, that I do feel that GPS data can often be better even with set and drift. If a fluxgate was perfect or near perfect I might agree but they are not, in the real world...

 

[Jackdaw]

On paper I would agree. The problem is we don't, and our boats don't live in the "on paper" or in the "lab" world, we live in the real world. I work in the real world I am on lots of boats and I have yet to see a single vessel that had a fluxgate sensor agree with the ships main compass on all points of sail. One of my customers is a professional compass adjuster, he sees the same thing. Some are off by as much as 10-15 degrees no matter how much you try to calibrate them.

What about magnetic disturbances? We have plenty of those along this coast... To take away GPS data because the chart could yaw away from the targets is a Band-Aid where one does not belong if the replacement is a fluxgate.. Neither heading data is perfect. Anyone who thinks it is is fooling themselves...

There is no perfect heading sensor unless you spend lots of money to get one. What they want you to use is a poor excuse for heading data, IMHO, on the vast majority of boats out there. Yesterday I had to replace a flux gate and found it less than 2' from a subwoofer, not doing overlay with that heading sensor.........

I feel fluxgate heading sensors are soooo poorly accurate, on the vast majority of boats, that I do feel that GPS data can often be better even with set and drift. If a fluxgate was perfect or near perfect I might agree but they are not, in the real world...

Good points as usual. Guess I should be happy with my 1-2 degree match error!

 

[jviss]

I take a stand to the contrary on this issue. To say that heading sensors are so often so poorly installed and poorly calibrated and therefore inaccurate and unreliable, and that the solution, therefore is a heading system that can be as much as 15º degrees off due to cross-currents, is a mistake, and could lead to accidents if boaters come to depend on the radar overlay. This is by no means the end of lawsuits, if someone get hurt, or suffers a large loss due to relying on this deceptive data source.

(Just for an extreme example - I would not rely on a gps cog based overlay going through Woods Hole! The current it seems is at times almost 90º to the channel).

The solution is better heading sensors! Good heading sensors are available, though costly. At the low end, in the sub-$1000 neighborhood, static accuracy of 1º, dynamic 2º is available. If boaters demanded accurate heading sensors for radar overlays we would certainly see the market price of these drop as vendors rushed in to satisfy the market demand. (As devices like these become mature, and volumes increase, prices drop). As long as people don't think they need them, and there is no pressure to add one, prices will remain high.

 

[anchorclanker]

I always thought the legislature wrote laws, not lawyers.

And what are most legislators backgrounds? With few exceptions they all have law degrees. We keep electing them, then complain when they dont do what they said they would do. They are lawyers, they can turn things around so fast with smiles and double talk no one can keep up with them. Like what the meaning of is, is.

 

[Maine Sail]

I take a stand to the contrary on this issue. To say that heading sensors are so often so poorly installed and poorly calibrated and therefore inaccurate and unreliable, and that the solution, therefore is a heading system that can be as much as 15º degrees off due to cross-currents, is a mistake, and could lead to accidents if boaters come to depend on the radar overlay. This is by no means the end of lawsuits, if someone get hurt, or suffers a large loss due to relying on this deceptive data source.

(Just for an extreme example - I would not rely on a gps cog based overlay going through Woods Hole! The current it seems is at times almost 90º to the channel).

The solution is better heading sensors! Good heading sensors are available, though costly. At the low end, in the sub-$1000 neighborhood, static accuracy of 1º, dynamic 2º is available. If boaters demanded accurate heading sensors for radar overlays we would certainly see the market price of these drop as vendors rushed in to satisfy the market demand. (As devices like these become mature, and volumes increase, prices drop). As long as people don't think they need them, and there is no pressure to add one, prices will remain high.

No one ever said GPS COG was a "solution". I don't know where you got that? It is an OPTION and HAS BEEN and option since radar overlay first hit the market. It is no longer an option purportedly due to a law suit.

It is an option that can work adequately for those who actually understand what and how radar overlay actually works and for those who don't have a "smart" heading sensor.. I have been using radar overlay pretty much since it hit the market and Maine gets lots of fog. I have personally owned and used Raymarine, Northstar and Garmin products with overlay. Some with smart heading data and some without. I have used it with both COG and smart heading sensors. Neither of them is perfect. In countless hours monitoring my plotter I've yet to see discrepancies of 15 degrees with COG data and yes we have strong currents in Maine. Can it happen? Sure, but anyone who is dumb enough to not understand that the radar target is what is accurate is just plain silly and needs a radar course.. I use overlay as another tertiary tool, that;s it. Radar is the primary in limited vis, not the overlay. It can help isolate rocks, ledges, islands etc. etc. from actual targets I want to track. That is a good use for overlay and whether it lines up on this yaw or that yaw it still makes target tracking easier. The worst overlay discrepancies I have seen have been when passing over a magnetic disturbance area using fluxgate data or while still spinning my dome on the hook using COG but at that point I am not navigating...

Again my concern is that when throw out one imperfect option for another imperfect option pretty soon we won't have any options for overlay....

My argument is that neither is perfect, both are flawed, and in the real world for many, many, many boats fluxgate data can very often be more inaccurate than COG so a law suit is just as likely with what most folks use as a "smart heading sensor".....

And yes quite a lot of autopilots are improperly installed, especially when it comes to the flux gate.

 

[jviss]

I agree that gps cog data is not a solution; I think the only good solution for this is a good heading data source, and yes, not a simple fluxgate compass; a smart heading sensor is a solution. Sure, cog data is an option, but ordinary users of nav equipment are going to assume that what they see on the screen is correct, will rely on it, and maybe get into trouble as a result; and they will hold the vendor responsible.

Meanwhile, while I know that I will know what the overlay is telling me, I'm not confident that the average boater will.

(Note that at 6 kt. you need about 1.6 kt of cross current to see a 15º error. This is easy to do crossing Vineyard Sound, for example, along one of the ferry routes from the cape to Martha's Vineyard).

Heading data is really important, I think you would agree. I expect, and hope, that heading sensors will get better and better, smarter and smarter: start integrating all available heading information (such as is done on Navy ships); and most promising, in my opinion, the high accuracy differential GPS system (in testing, 10cm horizontal accuracy) that would allow you to calculate heading based on two GPS receivers at either end of the boat.