Ruh-roh! Transducer transplant time.

"Can you install these transducers without a fairing block?" I was asked. "I don't know, what transducers?" came my muffled squawk from the interior bowels of the boat. Let me climb out of this god forsaken  hole and take a look."

My response was, "Sure you can install them without the fairing block, if they are pointing straight down. But these aren't level, not even close to level. Who installed these things?" The factory was the answer. The fairing blocks were still in the box along with the apparently unread instructions. This was Thursday morning and the boat was delivering Friday afternoon. I still had a lot of other things on my do list like finishing the autopilot and the security tracking system. What is the art of the possible in this case? Not much methinks. A plan is needed.

Garmin GCV Sonar Recording Movie Making

This little demonstration video turned out to be more of a challenge than I had anticipated, but in part it was my fault... sort of. The documentation didn't anticipate I would be dealing with three different Garmin 741xs MFD's, about 6 hours of sonar recordings archived on my computer from two of them, and a chart from a third. But with some excellent and very patient tech support from Garmin it all got sorted out. 

It also required some experimentation to get decent image quality. I started with the original very sharp recordings, played them back in Garmin's Homeport software. The recorded playback was captured using BB Flashback Express screen recording software. The newly created file was exported to a AVI format. From there the AVI clips were edited, and a simple soundtrack was created. The whole thing was then converted into a WMV format for upload to Youtube.

With each conversion you lose a little resolution. Aargh matey, I was in need of Dark and Stormies by the time I was done, but in the end I was happy with the results. It would have been better if the original recording format was a little more video friendly.