It handles the navigation.

It handles electrical and engineering systems. It handles boat security. It even handles personnel security, accounting for everyone on board through a system of tags. It handles the entertainment system. The only thing it didn't handle was the autopilot.

There's no technical reason why it couldn't handle the autopilot: it's apparently just a safety thing.

The skipper sits on the bridge watching the boat, its engines and other systems, the crew and anything else he wants to see on a series of fancy flat screens, changing views according to the application selected. In January this year, it was leading-edge technology.

But Garry Symes, whose company developed some of the software, tells me technology of the H6 kind will soon become run-of-the-mill and available in rather lower budget systems.

Symes is managing director of Future Data International , which also handles software development for companies like PC Plotter . And, he says, it won't be long before companies such as PC Plotter will be able to offer a similar range of applications.

"The technology is there and companies have the choice of buying from people who integrate all the bits and they know it's going to work, or they are going to buy systems that have all these interfaces ready to go and then buy the modules to plug in."

The H6 system is all packaged and ready to go, but that's obviously quite expensive, he added With smaller boats, the owner will do their planning at home on the laptop, then take it on board, plug in the additional bits and go.

"We 've already included weather, " he said. "PC Plotter now has all the tides, plus sun and moon rise times. We also digitised the Seafile electronic almanac to include a lot of extra data that doesn't appear on chart - such as First Aid, radio station frequencies and timings, port information, local anchorages, local restaurants and tons of other stuff."

But with the software moving at such a pace, surely the pressure is on you - and other software companies - to produce more sophisticated products, I asked?

Yes, and at a cheaper cost, he shot back.

So margins are always under pressure. "We tend to write off the development side of it, so we can keep adding features to give people extremely good value for money."

With an eye to the latest risk assessment regulations, I asked if PC Plotter has the software in place.

"All the features are in there and we are currently adding things like the weather, so the skipper can print out a whole sheet with the whole route, " he said.

It's more than a gizmo, he went on. "We tend to concentrate on the things we feel are essential and the risk assessment now is becoming essential."

But bringing H6 sophistication to the small boat market at an affordable price is being held up by one thing.

"The major problem now is screens, " said Symes. "To get them to the mass market at a reasonable price is probably two or three years away, maybe more."

But one company making a stab at it is B&G , with its RaceVision2, a wireless, waterproof tablet PC that allows navigators to work anywhere on the boat, even the weather rail.

The unit is designed to suffer the slings and arrows of a racing environment and still come up smiling.

It's housed in a fully sealed 6000 series aluminium alloy case, which boasts an IP67 waterproof rating.

And B&G says the toughened, transflective display screen is extremely strong, uses digitiser proximity sensing for touch screen control and is easy to read in bright sunshine or at night.

Being wireless means there's no chance of the unit shutting down if it gets caught up in a spinnaker drop or one of those delicate, wipe-out manoeuvres that amuse the competition but not the owner.

The unit can run on one battery while the other is changed, preserving data, and a waterproof charger means the navigator isn't dependent on battery life on long distance races.

C-Map has just been approved as a value added reseller (VAR) for the International Centre for ENCs (IC-ENC).

The centre was set up in 2002 to provide a qualified distribution organisation for participating hydrographic offices. Qualifying companies have to comply with a stringent set of requirements and have to be able to provide vessels sailing worldwide with an ENC service, including chart updates, that meets international regulations.

And C-Map has also released two new racing cartridges that will interest anyone racing on the South Coast this year.

The Solent Racing cartridge features all the racing buoys for the Solent at three different chart scales.

On normal C-Map cartridges the buoys are only included at the scales where they appear on the original paper chart, which in the case of the racing buoys is the detailed 25,000 scale charts.

But C-Map says to make the buoys appear at lower zoom scales, and allow large sections of the race course or whole legs to be seen on one page, it has included all of this year's racing buoys on its 25,000, 75,000 and 150,000 scale charts.

And to help minimise errors, each buoy's name is displayed along side its symbol.

The local cartridge, part number M-CU-C042, is priced at £62 + VAT.

And for anyone taking part in the Fastnet, C-Map has introduced a cartridge covering the whole course.

They say previously, it would have been necessary to have at least three standard cartridges to cover the race, but now it is possible with just a single cartridge.

What's more, C-Map has also included all the Solent Racing charts on this cartridge, making it good value for someone racing in the Solent and doing the Fastnet Race, it is only an extra £31 + VAT for a complete set of 75,000 scale and 150,000 scale charts from the Solent to the Fastnet Rock.

This standard cartridge, part number M-CU-C043, is priced at £93 + VAT.

More H6 technology has just come on the market from Ledwood Technology , which launched IRIS - Radar With Vision last month.

Used as part of the H6 system, it's described as one of the first radars able to connect easily with other navigation and marine information.

Ledwood says the clumsilynamed IRIS - Radar With Vision offers better compensation for boat movement and delivers the highest quality of image, enabling the user to detect more targets at a longer range with greater clarity and precision.

"People in the industry have been waiting for a high quality PC-based radar that can successfully integrate with other PC-based systems for along time, " said Nicky Howells, IRIS development manager.

"As well as the preferred radar for H6, IRIS is also being used as a speed trap in Dover Harbour."

According to Ledwood, the radar display uses professional quality 8-bit (256 levels) video for highest quality radar picture and uses advanced signal processing techniques to get top performance in rain and sea clutter.

They say the on-screen menu has no awkward buttons to use and controls the commercially available scanners while the Windows interface creates a familiar look and feel.

It has NMEA inputs for ship's navigation data and when linked to a chart plotter is able to display radar and charts simultaneously.

The long-range detection characteristics of Iris are, they say, unmatched. Where ordinary radar will clump several targets together making it difficult to define them, the website says Iris clearly isolates them giving the skipper accurate environmental information at all times.

Another company firmly at the leading edge of technology is Tacktick , with not only solar powered instruments, but now a completely wireless system of instruments.

When launched at METS last year, many felt Tacktick deserved the top prize, but for some reason it was not to be.

Started in 1996 by brothers Clive and Mark Johnson, the company now turns over £1 million - excluding sales from its latest Micronet product - and has eight employees.

According to Clive Johnson, Micronet will take the company into another world. "I expect to take on more staff to handle the demand and our Emsworth premises will last us only one more year before we have to move."

The brains behind the software is brother Mark Johnson, says Clive. And Mark's innovative, solar-powered, wireless system is now set to upset a lot of manufacturers who have spent hundreds of thousands developing CAN-bus systems that rely on a single cable to transport a mass of data between instrument transducers, processors and heads, replacing the traditional ugly - and very heavy - wiring harness of yesteryear.

Their cable-based systems are already obsolete. And forget Bluetooth - it's much too power hungry, says Clive Johnson, so we developed a new protocol to reduce power consumption.

The Johnson's Micronet system will be available to the public in July and Clive Johnson is under no illusions that Tacktick is going to have the market all to itself.

The competition is already flat out trying to catch up. "We have a head start of between three to five years, " said Johnson.

"Then it will all start again."

But the brothers already have the next product lines in development.

From one solar powered race compass in 1997, Tacktick now commands an 80% share of the electronics market in classes such as J22, 24 and 180s Melges 24s and Corby 25s.

Olympic boats such as the Star, Tornado, Yingling and 49er all use Tacktick products. And the Dragon class recently voted to change its rules to allow electronic compasses - another large international fleet opening up, says the company.

The launch of Micronet takes the company into the big boat market. And the powerboat market, which has always faced problems of vibration shaking connections apart.

Apart from the instruments, which work as you'd expect them to, Micronet's BIG selling point is its ease of installation.

Being wireless means, of course, there are no cables running around the boat. Or up the mast.

Installing a Tacktick instrument requires only that the new instrument is switched on and then placed alongside a functioning display. It will tune itself into the network.

Put the instrument in its cradle and it's ready. And, as each head has its own cradle, the instrument can be removed and taken home when the boat is at its berth. "Saves it getting nicked, " said Johnson.

The saving in cost on installation is enormous. "We spend as much on fitting instruments as buying them, " said Elan Yacht Sales' Bruce Hollis.

Especially when masthead units are required. A Tacktick unit can be installed by one man from a Bosun's chair in as long as it takes to winch him up there so he can screw it in place: 15 minutes?

No wires up the mast - nothing to slap as the boat rocks in the marina; no extra weigh aloft; no worries about grommets letting water into the instruments; no holes in the deck or bulkheads; no misting of instrument heads.

And no worries about loss of power. The solar charge goes into lithium cells that give some 300 hours backup - that's more than a week running in pitch dark with full back lighting on.

This means, of course, the end of the sometimes vindictive engine start-up "to charge the batteries" that always seem to happen to one watch below more than others??. .

For the future, Johnson says as soon as GPS chip manufacturers can get their power requirements down, Tacktick will be there waiting.

"It will all depend on the mobile 'phone manufacturers, he said. "They want to put GPS chips into every handset, so they are driving development."

The Micronet system will take a GPS input - and input from any instrument that talks NMEA (a laptop or chartplotter, perhaps) - via Tacktick's NMEA interface, which forwards the data via its wireless network. And Tacktick says its NMEA interface can talk with an autopilot.

Displays are available as analogue or digital. The analogue are said to be ideal for wind and course information, while the digital displays can show one or two lines of data and are programmable with seven page settings.

Tacktick quotes prices against its competitors which, when pitting installation costs of £30 for Tacktick against £345 for the others, shows Tacktick off in a very competitive light.

Elan Yachts says Tacktick is now the preferred supplier for its boats and Clive Johnson says Beneteau and Bavaria "are queuing up" to talk.

At the heavier end of the market, Norcontrol IT completed its installation of a new Channel Navigation Information Service (CNIS) at Dover Coastguard Station in April.

Worth over £1m, the contract included operations room workstations and an emergency training and planning facility.

The Dover Strait is one of the busiest waterways in the world, used by more than 400 commercial craft every day and the Coastguard's job is not made any easier by the many small craft that still get the crossing angles wrong and, according to controller Gordon Wise, still can't use the radio properly.

"Yes, we do still get people trying to sign off with 'over and out', he grimaced." He blames television.

The Dover CNIS system is based on Norcontrol's VTMIS5060 that's in use in more than 40 ports around the world and guards the Strait of Gibraltar and the Straits of Singapore.

The object of the system is to provide through traffic with essential information in time for the master to make navigational decisions.

Broadcasts are made every hour (30 minutes if visibility drops below two miles) to give warnings of navigational difficulties, weather conditions and traffic information in the traffic separation lanes.

The kind of information broadcast might be about misplaced or U/S navigational aids, hampered vessels, deep draught bulk carriers - such as the Bergestahl , now the biggest bulk carrier in the world at 364,000 tons deadweight - tankers, vessels under tow, surveying vessels and unorthodox crossings, such as cross channel swims.

The new system features a means of identifying craft - automatic identification system (AIS) - which might have been A Good Thing back in December last year when the Tricolor and the Kariba collided in fog 30 miles east of Ramsgate.

The 50,000 tons Tricolor wascarrying a cargo of nearly 3,000 luxury cars worth around £30m she had picked up in Rotterdam and was taking to Southampton.

Shortly after she went down, the Tricolor was hit by another vessel. Since then, another two ships have hit the wreck.

Which brings into question the wisdom of spending £1m on a system that seemingly can't stop mariners ploughing their vessels into wrecks.

This is in spite of the fact that the English, French and Belgian Coastguards broadcast regular warnings about the wreck.

And the wreck is surrounded by five Racon buoys.

And there's a French guardship riding shotgun on it.

Perhaps the first collision was unavoidable, " said Wise. It was only a few hours after the Tricolor had gone down, so no warnings had been put out.

But the other two brought raised eyebrows and a shake of the head. "Probably people automatically think a wreck is on the bottom and they can sail over it, " he said. "but if they checked their Notices they'd find the Tricolor has a beam of 32m and she lies on her side in 26m of water."

"The CNIS functions almost like an air traffic control system, " said Norcontrol IT project manager, Hilde Krogenes. "Utilising a chain of radars, VHF direction finding sensors and AIS, a common image is created on the screen representing each ship. The screens are equipped with an interactive electronic chart display representing the area of the Channel under CNIS authority, on which movements can be monitored and controlled."

Wise said could the marine trade tell all its clients to please listen to what the Coastguard tells them.

has launched what it claims is the world's first fishfinder to use digital technology.

The company says the patentpending technology greatly improves the performance of fishfinders by providing fishermen with an infinite number of bandwidth settings for optimal performance in all depth ranges.

Gone are the days of adjusting complex fishfinder settings, they say - high definition fish imaging technology provides real "hands off" performance regardless of sea conditions.

The digitally adaptive transmitter and receiver automatically analyses the water column and seabed and adjusts the receiver bandwidth to match the water conditions.

"For the first time in history a fishfinder uses true digital technology to infinitely and automatically vary the settings at the different depths in the water column, " said Stuart Thompson, Raymarine's international sales and marketing director.

The key to the new system is the DSM250, a digital sounder module that can be integrated with Raymarine's Pathfinder radars and Raycharts.

Raymarine says with the DSM250, the receiver bandwidth is automatically adjusted from very wide to very narrow, delivering superior fish detection. They say this breakthrough is due to the digitally adaptive filter that the company's engineers have developed over years of research and development.

Constantly adapting with a very high ping rate the DSM250, allows users to see clear displays of individual fish, enhanced bottom definition and the reduction of surface clutter on the fishfinder screen.

Electronics Contacts:

B&G T: 01794 518448 F: 01794518077 W: BandG.com C-Map T: 01329 517777 F: 01329 517778 E: sales@c-map.co.uk W: c-map.co.uk Future Data International T: 023 8028 4369 E: sales@futuredata.com W: futuredata.com Ledwood Technology T: 01646 623000 F: 01646 623699 E: info@ledwood.co.uk W: irisradar.com Norcontrol IT T: 01454 774466 F: 01454 774488 E: sales@norcontrolit.com W: norcontrolit.com PC Plotter T: 023 8028 2339 E: sales@pcplotter.com W: pcplotter.com Raymarine T: 023 9269 3611 F: 023 9269 4642 E: sales@raymarine.com W: raymarine.com Tacktick T: 01243 379331 F: 01243 379199 E: sales@tacktick.co.uk W: tacktick.com