Panbo

01/10/2025

Digital Yacht's Bilge IQ won the Best New Product award at this year's National Marine Electronics Association (NMEA) conference. Read about why my fellow judges and I feel Bilge IQ deserves recognition and how it can help you keep on top of your bilge.

-Ben S.

Last week, the National Marine Electronics Association (NMEA) held their annual conference in West Palm Beach. This year's conference featured quite a few interesting product introductions. I had the opportunity to see most of them while helping judge the NMEA's Best New Product and NMEA Technology....

02/09/2025

Somewhat last minute, I decided to throw a Starlink Mini into my backpack. Boy am I glad I did. We have had flawless coverage from the moment we hopped onboard. It’s just sitting on the bow, potentially blocked by the rigging, chugging along.

01/09/2025

I can't imagine a better place to try out Aqua Map's route planner and automatic routing than Croatia's beautiful coast along the Adriatic Sea.

Aqua Map has added automatic routing via a new route planner that allows hybrid automatic and manual route planning. Check out a brief demonstration of the f...

18/08/2025

After many hours on the water I'm excited to share my impressions comparing the current state of the art in pitch and roll control systems for planing boats.

I compared Seakeeper Ride, Zipwake Series E, and Lenco Pro Control to find the best performing system out there.

-Ben S.

Panbo compares Seakeeper Lenco Pro Control, Ride, and ZipWake Series E pitch and roll control systems and their ability to control boats

17/08/2025

I'm sure that a great many people in the marine electronics industry are also sad to lose Jim Fullilove:

I am sad that I will never get to hang out with Jim Fullilove again, but glad to find this ethereal image of him in my photo archives. I don’t recall what marine electronics...

01/08/2025

The American Boat & Yacht Council - ABYC recently published revisions to numerous srtandards. Including E-11 -- covering AC and DC electrical systems -- and E-13 -- covering lithium ion batteries. Here's a run through of some of the most impactful changes in these standards.

-Ben S.

ABYC published updates to their E-11 and E-13 standards. E-11 covers the basic requirements for AC and DC systems on a boat. E-11 is a mature standard and the revisions reflect that maturity. This is the first revision of ABYC's E-13 lithium ion battery standards. The first publication of E-13 incor...

15/07/2025

Victron Energy B.V.'s Smart NG batteries offer some very attractive features, none bigger than the ability to parallel multiple banks.

-Ben S.

If you made a list of all the features you require and prefer in your boat's batteries, I would bet that Victron's NG Smart batteries would check just about every item on your list. In a field where it sometimes feels like we are all field testing products, Victron's batteries, BMSes, and software e...

07/07/2025

Price reduced on a great cruising boat with lots of great electronics -- Ben E

Cruise away from it all aboard the Duffy 37 Gizmo Price reduced to $225,000 on July 1 2025 This Duffy 37 was especially laid up and elegantly finished out in 2000 for a sailor/engineer...

01/07/2025

Hot off the presses! Maretron has been acquired by Teledyne via Teledyne's Raymarine subsidiary. I think this is great news for Maretron and their long history of innovation in NMEA 2000, digital switching, and sensors.

-Ben S.

THOUSAND OAKS, Calif. – July 1, 2025 – Teledyne Technologies Incorporated (NYSE:TDY) announced today the acquisition of assets of Maretron, including the brand’s Octoplex, MPower and MConnect product lines from Littelfuse, Inc. (NASDAQ:LFUS). The...

24/06/2025

My testing of Simrad Yachting's new NSS 4 was interrupted by a broken arm. I'm back at it and have some preliminary results.

-Ben S.

Simrad's NSS 4 (and Navico stablemate B and G Zeus SR) is the second major installment in Navico's march towards their new Neon Android based operating system and C-Map X series charts. NSX, the first Navico MFD with Neon showed very well at launch. I am a fan of the visual presentation, new charts,...

12/06/2025

Garmin Marine introduced the GPSMap 15x3 ultrawide chartplotters today. Nice to see a second entrant into this category. It certainly seems likely we will see more non-traditional sizes. The ultrawides pair very nicely with clean, all glass helms

Ultrawide and simplified to deliver a more streamlined and immersive experience at the helm OLATHE, Kan./June 12, 2025/PR Newswire – Garmin (NYSE: GRMN), the world’s largest and most innovative marine electronics manufacturer, today announced...

10/06/2025

WIF-Pro alerts boaters to trouble with water in their fuel. It's a well designed system that helps boaters avoid bigger trouble.

-Ben S.

WIF-Pro is my favorite kind of company to cover, a relatively new startup with a fresh take on an old problem. I first learned about and met WIF-Pro's founder, Brian Benedict, at IBEX 2023. Brian, a mortgage banker by day and water in fuel alerter by night, founded WIF-Pro because of his own experie...