Military Catalog

SOLAS Chapter V Regulation 19.2.2.3 has required a Bridge Navigation Watch Alarm System on essentially every cargo ship over 150 gross tons and every passenger vessel since 1 July 2011, with phased retrofit deadlines closing through July 2014. The compliance

A marine display that runs a commercial chart plotter at a marina office will fail in weeks on a patrol boat or a USNS workboat. The hardware is not the same. The qualification testing it had to pass before delivery

The radar picture is clean and the chart says you have plenty of water. Then a small fishing skiff with no lights drifts across the channel at two in the morning, and the deck crew sees it only because the

A marine computer that ran flawlessly on the bench can still go dark the first time the bow thruster fires, the genset kicks in, or the vessel switches from shore power to inverter. Bridge electronics live on a power bus

Chart scale on an ECDIS is one of the quietest decisions on a bridge watch and one of the most consequential. A vessel can be running compliant hardware, an up-to-date electronic navigational chart cell, and a fully type-approved system, and

Most bridge upgrades stall on the same two questions: how big should each marine monitor be, and where exactly does it bolt in? A modern commercial bridge can carry anywhere from three to twelve fixed displays, and getting the sizing

Two cabinets show up on the same bridge. The first is an off-the-shelf marine multifunction display the previous owner installed five years ago, still running its bundled charts, sonar, and radar. The second is a 24-inch rugged marine monitor the

On a sportfishing boat at one in the afternoon in July, the sun comes through the windscreen at an angle that turns most LCDs into a mirror. The captain glances down to confirm the chart, sees their own face reflected

A marine touchscreen sounds like a single product category until the first time someone tries to use one with wet gloved hands during a squall. Touch hardware behaves very differently depending on which technology is sitting under the cover glass.

A radar return tells you something is out there. The ECDIS chart tells you where you are. Neither tells you what is actually happening on your own deck, at the bow at night, or near the waterline as you ease

Ask a captain what an integrated bridge system is, and you will hear a mix of marketing language and personal history. Ask a class surveyor and you will get a fairly precise answer rooted in IMO and IEC standards. The

Two cut sheets land on your desk. One marine display lists NEMA 4X. The other lists IP67. The boat is the same, the helm position is the same, and the boss wants to know which one to spec. The honest

On a working bridge, every wasted inch of console space and every extra cable matters. When a captain or systems integrator sits down to spec the next round of bridge electronics, the question almost always lands on the same fork

If you are speccing hardware for a SOLAS-class bridge, the words “ECDIS-ready,” “ECDIS-compliant,” and “type-approved” get used almost interchangeably in product copy. They are not the same thing, and the wrong choice can fail a flag state inspection, force a

Most ship operators now run radar, ECDIS, engine telemetry, and CCTV through commercial PC stacks on the bridge. The screens get talked about constantly. The input device sitting between the watchkeeper and that stack rarely does, and it is the