Hunting for the elusive tooter fish

For those of you who aren’t readers of Stephen King, I am, of course referring to tuna fish and here at the boat show, that means tuna towers. To the uninitiated, these things literally tower over the sportfishing boats to which they’re mounted, looking like incomplete, amusement park rides built by a sadistic engineer with an erector set. When you look at them, you have to wonder a) how much do you have to pay someone to climb up there when the boat is going like a bat out of hell and b) how do you keep from getting hurled out and toward the horizon when the boat slams into a wave?


Obviously people are willing to do a) and have some way of preventing b) as they use the higher vantage point to chase after game fish. But from a satellite TV perspective, these things are murder on satellite TV as the aluminum structure is just signal blockage waiting to happen. So the obvious solution is to take the antenna higher, right? Yes, but will the antenna survive there? In boat tests, the Gees experienced at the top of a tuna tower when the boat is banging through the waves at speed is more than the astronauts experience when the space shuttle launches. That instant, jamming shock will tear a piece of moving equipment apart if it’s not built right.


And that’s where our High-Performance (HP™) design comes into play. Introduced in 2005 in our 4/G4 and 6/G6 lines and now part of the new TracVision M5 and M7, the HP design includes structural enhancements, more powerful motors, and improved tracking algorithms designed to allow the antenna not only to survive its life atop the tuna tower but remain locked onto the satellite even while flying pell-mell in pursuit of a fish. Walking the show, I didn’t see many tuna tower installs that weren’t using one of our TracVisions and one that did…well, it wasn’t in the best shape as it looked like someone had taken a hammer to it. I’m too much of a gentleman to say who made it (and I’m unsure of the legal ramifications if I did here in a KVH blog) but whoever bought it can’t be too happy with it, especially now that they’re trying to sell the boat!