Flipped
If you haven’t bought a new boat in say, five years, chances are your vessel doesn’t use digital switching in any meaningful way. But you use it all the time. You know how your car lets you control the heating system from the dashboard or from the infotainment control screen in the center of the dash? That’s digital switching. You know how you can tune the radio or adjust the volume on the steering wheel as well as the in-dash unit? Same deal. The wiring to multiply that control point is electronic—not electric. Think skinny wires and tiny voltages—signals instead of current. The marine electronics companies that are working with it seem to have finally loaded their multifunction displays with enough bandwidth—think quad-core processors, such as on Raymarine’s Axiom multifunction displays and the Simrad NSO evo3 units.
