[jimh]

The Raymarine A60 and A65 are dual function instruments which have a GPS receiver, an electronic display, and a SONAR. Their operating system allows for the capture of the screen display to a file which is stored on a Compact Flash (CF) memory card. The display image is saved to a BMP file (device-independent bitmap format) on the root directory of the CF memory card. This feature is useful for capturing the SONAR echogram display, for example, or for any other screen display.

The CF memory card can be removed from the A60 or A65 instrument and inserted in a memory card reader. Using a ScanDisk CF memory card reader with USB interface, I was able to mount the memory card onto the MacOS (Mac OS V10.4.11) and access the stored BMP files.

A further enhancement in the Raymarine A60 and A65 is the recording of meta-data about the screen image file. When the screen image is recorded, a second file containing meta-data (data about the data) is also written. The file contains the following data:

--date
--time
--position
--course over ground
--speed over ground
--depth
--temperature of the water
--frequency of SONAR
--gain of SONAR
--battery voltage
--internal temperature of the instrument

The meta-data file is written in plain ASCII text and is easily read by any Mac application which can open and read a text file. The meta-data file is very useful as it relieves the operator of having to make copious notes about each screen image that has been saved.

In addition to the screen image and the meta-data, a third file is written which creates a simple HTML page that combines the image and the meta-data into a graphic and a tabular presentation. The HTML also includes a link to GOOGLE MAPS which will display the location. This file may be useful for those who are not familiar with creating HTML.

The Raymarine device keeps track of the file naming. The first screen capture file sequence is named DUMP0001.BMP, DUMP0001.TXT, and DUMP001.HTM. If you make subsequent captures they are named DUMP0002, DUMP0003, and so on.

The screen capture is written to the CF memory card. On the Raymarine A60 and A65 there is only one CF memory card slot. The digital cartography for the instrument is stored on and provided by a Navionics Silver CF memory card. This means that if you want to make a screen capture of a screen image which contains cartography you will have to record the image onto the same CF memory card that contains the cartography. The manual cautions against doing this, but I was able to grab a few images and record them onto the Navionics card with no apparent harm to it. If you wanted to grab only SONAR echogram images, it might be prudent to insert a different CF memory card. I used a 256-MB CF memory card which I had been using with my Nikon digital camera, and I was able to make recordings to it with the A60. So there apparently is no special formating or file structure needed for the CF memory card to be used in the A60.

Raymarine has done a good job here in providing a useful function in their A60 and A65 instrument which is completely compatible with the MacOS (or any other OS for that matter whcih can mount the CF memory card's file system). While there are other SONAR devices which allow for capture of the screen, most of them provide the captured data in formats which need a Windows binary executable program to view them.

I have written a brief review of the Raymarine A60 and included some examples of the screen captures. See

http://continuouswave.com/whaler/reference/A60.html