I'll admit I haven't made my point very well. If I've insulted people along the way that's not new and I stopped caring a long time ago since my targets are mostly doing just fine in life otherwise.

What I am trying to get at poorly is that it would be nice if new stuff didn't require changing everything. It would be nice if somebody would think about us regular folks who aren't made of money. But when it comes to boat stuff all these companies pander to people with money and in a lot of cases it's hard to get them to even talk to you if you don't have a huge boat and a blank check to hand them. My experience has been, for the most part, giving a company a big chunk of change but still being treated like they are doing me a favor. It really gets tiresome and I'm pretty sure it's because there are a lot of 'money is no object' clueless boat owners out there.

There are a lot of 20+ year old electronics still working fine. I'm not enamored by all the new wiz bang technology. For the most part it's not useful to me or impressive. My new PC is not noticeably faster than the old one because bloatware has bogged it down. Things like smart phones don't seem very smart to me since they can't get more than a stones throw from a charging station and just when you need them most the battery dies. Cars these days can't be fixed. If the electronics go down you are done, dead in the water so to speak. With an old car all you needed was fuel, spark, and air and you were running. Sure new cars are nice in many ways but would you really go alone deep into wilderness with one knowing there is nothing you can do to make it go should something fail?

Boats are things that need to keep working. The systems need to be robust. Like military systems which are expected to last and work when needed boat systems should be thought of in the same way. These are not gadgets for the distracted masses these are tools to be used in specialized and in many cases hazardous endeavors.

My B&G system was obsolete when I bought it and that's my fault, but it's only ten years old and the wind speed transducer failed after only five years. I've been complaining and going on rants for the five years since. What would I like? Enough schematics and theory of operations to repair or replace a given component. But the fact is as I've said management doesn't want me to repair my system they want me to buy an entirely new one. And to kick the dead horse again they don't care that little old me isn't going to buy a new system because they have plenty of people impressed by new technology and having the money to buy it.

But really if you think about all this as a boat owner it starts to make more sense than say a PC customer who needs the latest to run the new bloat from MS or whoever. On the boat the holes the instruments are in still exist. The size for the instrument location doesn't change. Fitting some kind of new display of a different size and cutout is impractical at best. The difficult to run cabling is still perfectly good as are most of the instruments. How much data do you really need to run over those wires? The good old twisted pair RS425 should work just fine for all time as a connection. So if you care about your customer you'd keep the displays the same size and cutout, you'd keep the same cable and connectors and interfaces if possible. If an interface needs to change you'd make an adapter module so old customers aren't left out and forced to upgrade.

As for the transducer the plastics are still perfectly good, all that it's going to need is either a small fix or a re-engineering that shouldn't be difficult. Really it's not rocket science to make a wind speed instrument and it shouldn't cost so much to replace. I understand supply and demand, but I already paid the $700 or whatever it is for the masthead unit. All I need now are some components to keep it going but that information is unavailable to me. Think back on the car analogy. In the old days maybe you needed new points and condenser to keep running, that's just a few bucks and you can make the change on the side of the road, but with the new car if the CPU goes down, which they do, you are stuck on the side of the road and will need a tow to a dealer and a many hundreds of dollars new CPU to make it go again. A simple ignition failure now costs thousands of dollars and makes you dependent on help from the outside when in the old days it was a few bucks and a 15 minutes road side repair.

Yeah my time is valuable but $700 is $700 and for me that's also a lot of money. In addition to that I'm trying to understand the system so that if I choose I can implement fixes based on components I buy from Digikey for $10. If I were to buy a new system I'd be right back where I am today five years from now when components start to fail. However if I can understand and build up fixes then I can keep the system going indefinitely. In my dream I'd like to start a company that builds sailboat instruments like this. It's very much a commercial or military type of mind set where old systems keep working for long periods of time and need to be repairable whereas the B&G type companies have a consumer grade mindset and things are made to last five years and after that entire systems need to be replaced. Imagine how Rockwell would fare if they told factory owners that they had to completely change their entire system of control modules every five years or so? I'll tell you what would happen. They'd go out of business that's what would happen.

Life is short and limited. I've got a given amount of time to earn enough money to be a boat owner and to create the financial space to be able to take time off and go sail. Unlike all the 'best and brightest' money isn't that easy for me to come by. Looking back on it my desire to have an awesome boat with the best of this and best of that has been nothing more than a trap to keep me working longer, perhaps for the rest of my life. So I've got this awesome boat now but struggle to get enough days off to even get to the ocean let alone go somewhere once I'm out there. That's all my fault and I'm an idiot, but I've had help wasting my money and that's what my rant is about.

Stuff like cr@ppy West Marine pole holders that drop my $300 worth of fishing gear into the sea on their third day of use don't help me. Stuff like charts you buy from Garmin that use publically acquired data and are no different than charts that can be had for free from NOAA are not helping. Sure I'm happy that new instrument displays are potted so they don't fog up and are waterproof, but at the price of some hundreds or more they aren't helping me either.

What helps are products designed from the start to last, products that fill a need that can't be found for free elsewhere, but mostly what I need are products from companies that respect me as an individual with a limited budget rather than companies that treat me like a one man stimulus package or pull attitude on me when I question why they installed a trysail track but no one bothered to test it out. Why do I keep spending this money and still having to micromanage a job to be sure it's done right? Why do I keep getting really low grade products? What the useful life of a pole holder anyway? Surely it must be more than three days