Friday, March 23, 2007

Changes in attitudes, changes in latitudes

Jimmy Buffett's newest CD...$13.99

Margaritaville T-shirt from the Margaritaville store in Key West...$18.95

Not having to listen to 7 more hours of Jimmy Buffett songs butchered by a guy who's off-key and has a microphone down on the docks and instead sitting in the airport waiting for the flight home...Priceless

Meet the Press (or, listen, I can hear the crickets in the still night air)

It’s been quiet here in Palm Beach, press-wise. Most of them seem to be elsewhere though everyone I’ve been in touch with who isn’t here is looking at providing some coverage of the new M-series. We did get a visit from BoatTest.com, which shot a feature piece on the M5 yesterday and expects to run it as part of their newsletter next Thursday, but compared to Lauderdale and Miami (so I’ve been told), Palm Beach 2007 has turned into something of a ghost town when it comes to media covering the boat show.

So if you’ve got some spare cash…

What are you to do if you desperately want to own a megayacht but can’t quite scrape up the scratch to buy one outright? Well, have I got a deal for you. For only $775,000, you can purchase a fractional ownership. That’s right, you can buy 1/6 of a megayacht, giving you the right to spend 55 days on it over the course of a year.

Excuse me, sir, but you do know what sort of restaurant this is, don’t you?

Overheard this morning as we had breakfast at a little French café (appropriately named the Paris Bakery and Café) near the boat show:

“Excuse me, do you have any English muffins?”

The look from the delightful proprietress, who was clearly French, was priceless. Needless to say, no, they didn’t have any English muffins but Rick G assures me that he still enjoyed his breakfast a great deal.

Like a family reunion of Energizer Bunnies

Spotted amidst all of the new TracVision systems while walking the docks here at the Palm Beach show…

Two TracVision 3s, our first digital satellite TV system circa 1999…





and a TracVision II (circa 1997)…


and best of all, they’re all still working without a hitch!

The best reason to have a TracNet 100

9 days and counting until opening day!

I know what I'm going to do when I win the lottery

So, you’ve just plunked down a few million dollars on a new yacht. Besides coming by our booth to inquire a new TracVision and TracPhone system (as did the gentleman who closed on his new 55 foot Azimut just yesterday), what do you do to celebrate? How about buy an outrageously priced car? Just across the way from us is an exhibit by Palm Beach’s leading dealer for Ferarris, Maseratis, Jaguars, and…oh my…Aston Martins. I think I’m in love. What else can you say when you see one of the world’s most beautiful cars up close and personal? If someone is looking for ideas, I know what you can get me for my birthday in a few weeks.

OK, so it's a Vantage, not quite as nice as the DB9 with the new sport package, but I'd take it in a pinch. And would someone please tell that guy to get his butt off my car!

There are eight million stories in the naked city

Everyone comes to the show looking for something different and with a different story…
  • there's the gentleman interested in our TracPhone F77 for the new 110 ft sailboat he’s having built in Taiwan and scheduled for delivery sometime in 2008
  • the fellow who did something that, frankly, I thought was illegal in boating circles…he downsized, going from an 85 footer to a 40 footer. However, he liked his TracVision 4 so much he took it with him to the new boat but had cut all the cables when uninstalling it (easy solution – a KVH cable harness…check with a dealer near you for pricing).

Double your pleasure, double your fun


Yes, you are seeing double, actually. Quite a few boats here at the show are sporting not just dual-dome installs but dual TracVision installs. Why would someone need two satellite TV systems you ask? Well, there's the technical answer and the easy answer so pull up a chair and pay attention…there will be a test later.

Because a house isn’t moving and the angles from the house to the satellites always remains the same, a home satellite TV dish is able to look at one, two, or even three satellites at once, with the signals from each being reflected to a different low noise block (LNB) from which the signal is relayed to the various receivers inside the home. This allows folks to watch different channels being broadcast by different satellites (HDTV and standard programming, for example).

However, a satellite TV system on a moving platform is only able to look at one satellite at a time because it is constantly shifting its position to stay locked onto the satellite as the vessel or vehicle is moving. As a result, with one antenna, you can watch as many different channels as you wish provided there’s a receiver for every television AND all of the channels are being broadcast by the same satellite.


Now if you and your passengers want to watch CNN, ESPN, Cartoon Network, and HBO at the same time, that’s no problem since they’re all broadcast from the same bird (using DIRECTV as example, that would be the satellite at 101˚W). But what if you really wanted to watch Monday Night Football on ESPN’s high-definition channel (broadcast on DIRECTV 110˚W) and your buddy is the president of the Peter Weller Fan Club and can’t miss a showing of “The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension” on the Sci-Fi Channel (DIRECTV 101˚W)?

Well, then you’ll either have to flip a coin to see which satellite you are going to track OR you do what these intrepid boat owners do and get two TracVision domes. (Or you just channel surf and flip from the 110 bird to the 101 bird and back again during commercial breaks or time-outs. With the new TracVision M-series, you can do that simply by changing the channel using the remote control! Sweet!)



Of course, that's the technical answer. The easy answer...boat owners want their boats to look as balanced as possible so it's perfectly likely that some of them have bought empty "dummy" domes to install and balance out the install of the real TracVision system. As a bonus to KVH, the technical support needed for dummy domes is minimal!

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!

On a day like today, they should be selling sailboats

Today has not been a blue sky Florida postcard. It’s been grey, overcast, a few spotty showers, occasionally glimpses of sun, and windy, very very windy. While there aren’t really any sailboats on display, it sounds like there are as the various ropes and awnings clank against aluminum tent poles like halyards on masts. There have been a few gusts that make you want to step gingerly away from the tent on the off-chance that it’s about to become a large kite and head for Cuba. However, we're all in short sleeve shirts, most visitors to the show are wearing shorts, and it's apparently wet and in the 40s back home. I think we can handle the wind.