Northrop Grumman Corp’s Sperry Marine provides two paperless navigation products that will be updated to meet the revised International Hydrographic Organization (IHO) ecdis standards that were published in 2015. The Ecdis-E is a cost effective solution for paperless navigation, while the VisionMaster FT Ecdis can be integrated with radar and other Sperry Marine navigation products, such as track control and steering, a planning station, and radar overlay.
According to the company’s head of marketing Linda Walden, Sperry Marine ecdis has unique features, such as track control and independent cross tracking. “The track control is used to keep the ship on a monitored voyage under differing conditions,” she said. “It consists of one or more VisionMaster nodes and our top-of-the-range Navipilot 4000 autopilot.” The independent cross tracking lines function gives navigators the option of setting different distances to support the voyage. Another feature gives officers the ability to tailor charting solutions to their specific requirements. Both ecdis products enable navigators to overlay information from the UKHO Admiralty, as well as weather forecasts and tidal data for voyage planning applications.
Sperry Marine set up an engineering task force in 2015 to ensure that its ecdis products were ready for the introduction of the IHO’s new standards, and that existing units are updated so owners remain fully compliant.
“No hardware replacement is necessary as the software supports all the hardware platforms, both current and previous,” she said. “Due to the level of complexity of Sperry Marine bridges on ships, it is much more beneficial for the customer to have an approved service engineer attend to the vessel to perform any updates or replacements, as this optimises turn-around time and minimises disruption to the vessel.”
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