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).

• another gentleman who came by our booth looking for TV, Internet, and communication solutions for his RV (yes, I think we’ll be able to help him out).

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.

The real reason to have satellite TV on your boat

So what if it's still only pre-season...Go Sawx! (live game broadcast courtesy of the KVH TracVision M5)

Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a dome

Shows like this aren’t just for selling boating gizmos, gadgets, and shirts decorated with palm trees and drinks with little umbrellas. They’re also for showing off and selling (or buying, depending on your perspective), boats – everything from inflatable lifeboats to small dinghies and Boston Whalers to multimillion dollar yachts. Of course, from KVH’s perspective, it’s the big boats that we care about…the ones with TV, the ones that truly can become home away from home. And walking around the docks today, you couldn’t miss the fact that all of them have TV and most of them have KVH TracVision systems.

Better Late than Never, I Suppose

OK, welcome to Day 1 of the 2007 Palm Beach Boat Show…well, actually, the end of Day 1 of the Palm Beach Boat Show. The very end, like 11:00 PM-in-the-hotel-when-normal-people-are-heading- to-bed-and-the-blog-writing-is-just-getting-underway the end. As it turns out, the concept of a near-real time report from the show never made it out of the concept stage due to a lack of good laptop typing space and spotty Internet connections. So instead, the blog will be a series of entries this evening and some more after the show tomorrow.

Palm Beach is the last of the bigger boat shows before the spring fitting-out season really gets underway, following close on the heels of the Miami show. The show is pretty spread out, with many exhibits across town in the Convention Center and the rest outside along the Intracoastal Waterway (where we are).

Exhibit Row at Palm Beach 2007

We’ve got a lot packed into a fairly tight space – 10 ft by 20 ft – with the full suite of TracPhone Fleet products, the full set of TracVision M-series products, a working TracNet 100, and a working TracVision M5…plus two chairs, several briefcases, and a partridge in a pear tree.

The KVH exhibit

Unlike other shows – CES, SEMA, Miami – we’ve got a fairly small team in town for this show. However, our Florida distributor is attending and several of our dealers from the east coast are here as well so there’s a wealth of TracVision expertise on hand.

Rick Garrison gets the TracNet 100 up and running

Steven Buckingham (aka Buck) assists some potential TracPhone buyers

Ian Palmer and a boat owner discussing Inmarsat airtime

Jim George (right) chats with Buck and KVH alum Rob Solomon

At the end of the day, Buck shows how he's learned to win friends and influence people