February 28, 2007 00:41
Was flicking through the latest Practical Boat Owner last night when I saw one of the chandlers selling a "WIB2 USB Navtex receiver" by a German company called Wetterbox.
My initial thoughts were that it would probably incorporate an internal serial to USB convertor, and would as such require a specific driver for Mac OS.
![[Image: wib2m.jpg]](http://www.wetterinfobox.com/english/res/default/wib2m.jpg)
However, it turns out that this nifty little piece of kit is accessible from either Windows or OS X as a USB memory stick, with Navtex data being nicely indexed in HTML format. There's a demo device you can access here:
http://www.wetterinfobox.com/wib2demo/index.htm
What's more, the WIB2 has an internal battery which apparently lasts up to 3 days, so you don't need to have your Mac OR boat battery on.
The only disadvantage I can see with this device is that it doesn't output the standard serial stream of other Navtex decoders such as the Nasa engines which some charting programs use to integrate Navtex warnings into their systems (see my earlier post requesting this functionality in MacENC! ;-) )
Still pretty impressive, if you ask me...[url=http://www.wetterinfobox.com/wib2demo/index.htm]Full Specification Here..
My initial thoughts were that it would probably incorporate an internal serial to USB convertor, and would as such require a specific driver for Mac OS.
However, it turns out that this nifty little piece of kit is accessible from either Windows or OS X as a USB memory stick, with Navtex data being nicely indexed in HTML format. There's a demo device you can access here:
http://www.wetterinfobox.com/wib2demo/index.htm
What's more, the WIB2 has an internal battery which apparently lasts up to 3 days, so you don't need to have your Mac OR boat battery on.
The only disadvantage I can see with this device is that it doesn't output the standard serial stream of other Navtex decoders such as the Nasa engines which some charting programs use to integrate Navtex warnings into their systems (see my earlier post requesting this functionality in MacENC! ;-) )
Still pretty impressive, if you ask me...[url=http://www.wetterinfobox.com/wib2demo/index.htm]Full Specification Here..