Kaimusailing

On the last delivery the owner was replacing a couple of electronics and was going to toss the old units into the trash. I asked for them and now will try to sell them on eBay. I’ve never sold anything on eBay before. One unit is a Raymarine AIS650 transceiver, which is a great unit if you have a Raymarine system. On the owner’s boat it was transmitting the old name of the boat and of course was colliding with the new boat, constantly. No wonder he wanted to get rid of it. However, it is both a transmitter and receiver, so you get AIS contacts to send to your Raymarine chartplotter, plus you are transmitting your own AIS information and letting other vessels know where you are, who you are, and your course and speed. I could probably interface this unit with OpenCPN on the Getac laptop. Maybe I will if it doesn’t sell.
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The other unit is a Garmin 421 chartplotter. The 4 in the model number indicates the size of the display, 4 inches. Kind of small. It is a size that is adequate for a depth sounder, and if this unit were the 421s, it would accept a depth transducer. The s is for sonar. This unit will also be up for sale. It would be perfect for the little C&C 24, Trillium, but we’ve found that the Getac is the preferred navigation display and I can just lug it along onto the little boat. I navigated all the way down from Annapolis using my android phone, but maybe that was not wise.
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I have some other nautical items to dispose of. Let’s see how eBay works, I can lighten the boat and stash some cash.
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They say this is the last super moon of 2017, so I took a long look at it with the Skymasters. It was hard to keep them steady. Although the moon looks bright, there is enough stuff in the atmosphere to smudge it a bit. I decided to take a picture of it and got out the old Alpex lens. Because it is a manual lens, I had to refresh my memory about how to set up the camera. I wasn’t satisfied with the first results and decided to compare the image to a blown up image using the standard wide angle zoom lens that Canon sold with many of these cameras. They are not the highest quality lenses. I once more had to go back to the camera manual to find out how to manually set the iris on the automatic lens. I used the same settings as on the Alpex and shot at f11. When I blew up the wide angle image, which was zoomed as close as possible, it looked just a bit sharper than the Alpex image. The moon was now higher in the sky and thus not as much atmosphere was in the way. I had to take another shot with the Alpex and it too was sharper than the earlier shots. The image is cropped a bit from that shot.