Kerry

With regard weather forecasts "offshore" is generally considered beyond 60nm

A VHF is really a secondary support device, a cell phone should not be considered at all, they don't like water and can not be tracked.

It's gets interesting when one starts comparing just what is "equal" size when comparing the two. Equal size? but based on what criteria, length? weight? physical looking size? or ??

Worldcat are not designed or capable of carrying diesels properly. Obviously this would have been a half baked attempt destined to fail anyway by design.

The USA appears to be behind the times with mandatory Epirb carriage for (ALL) recreational vessels?

That's funny Still waiting for the OFFSHORE bit and the FISHING bit

Are you talking about an "old frequency Epirb" with GPS? If so these are totally illegal to use in the US (besides the fact they really don't work now) and have been that way since Jan 1 2007

Then I better send you a forwarding address

Fedex is really very quick, so it should be here by Wednesday then

Yep there is one thing for sure about standards, there are so many of them, subsets, supersets and propriety additions on top that make sure most things talk to each other just a little but only talk with full functionality with an intended few. One only has to look at the third party charting formats and connections with specific manufacturers to understand they don't want an open infrastructure.

"Away out of sight" your not wrong there, 15 years ago one could actually read the text on a phone, today you need a magnifying glass. So unless phones are going to get multiple times bigger and somehow I doubt that then no phones will not be the future of it all.

Yeah so the Chinese knock down one of their own weather satellites in 500 mile LEO and suddenly to some the GPS satellites at 10,500 miles are a target, come on, not everybody has come down in the lastest space junk furfy. Always get a good laugh out of those that claim Loran is jam proof. In any case I suppose who would want to try and jam Loran anyway, only going to affect a few old cruddy old age fisherman Like as if Loran is a crictical system!

The Garmin 48 will handle TD input but frankly the conversion is going to be fairly hopeless. There is no direct PCF type offset (from memory) but you could play around with a user defined datum shift/ transformation. Probably a lot more trouble than what it's worth?

Through the standard 10 micron racor no problems.

The key players with regard Loran are DoD who has not approved eLoran as backup for military applications, transportaion, aviation, commercial maritime, rail and highways have all determined there a sufficient alternatives and do not see Loran required as a backup. Loran is also not required by safety-of-life users. This is all from a pure navigational view point but Loran has been tagged as a possible backup for timing applications. In any case some of the Loran stations are still running on valves from the 1950's. The USCG who also see not future use for Loran will hand over operation of Loran to the DHS end of this Fiscal year. The DHS have since been head hunting justifications to keep Loran but they don;t have anything to backup their plan. About the only people still using it appear to be a few moth balled fisherman