Matt Wood, a former fisherman and now national sales manager at Furuno, has a good idea of what fishermen are looking for. “We were a little behind with our MFD screens,” Wood says of the company’s multi-function displays. “But now with the 22-inch and 24-inch screens we are out front again.”
The excitement about Furuno’s new MFDs started at the Miami International Boat Show in February. “We launched there,” says Wood, speaking in late April. “And we start shipping in early May.” Wood notes that the impacts of covid on the supply chain have largely disappeared and that the company is almost back to normal.
The new MFDs offer fishermen a chance to upgrade their electronics visualization on a screen that includes several innovations including a powerful new processor integrated into the screen itself, new functions such as AI Routing, radar target avoidance (Risk Visualizer), and affordable charts.
“Down in Miami we put our charts next to the CMOR charts, theirs use public and private data and cost $1,000 just for the Bahamas,” says Wood. “Ours gives you the whole Caribbean, including the Bahamas for $250.” While the vector and rastor charts, and BathyVision have been standard in Nobeltec’s TimeZero PC programs, Furuno has now put them into its big screen MFDs.
“Our feedback has been great,” says Wood. “We had a guy who’d put together a 65-mile route over the course of several years, and the AI routing put the same route together in 8 seconds.” Wood adds that the Furuno team tested the AI avoidance, creating situations with multiple targets going red. “The Risk Visualizer and AI Avoidance Route worked perfectly. We’re excited about that.”
The new Furuno MFD is designed to sell across a variety of markets, but Wood notes that it includes features and functionality that should appeal to commercial fishermen.
“Anybody who is fishing pots will love BathyVision,” says Wood. “For trawlers, especially midwater, if you have DFF3D multibeam sounder you can see what’s around you. The MFD offer a six-way screen split so you can look at information from multiple sounders, 3D, single beam, whatever you have. We’ve said it before, the fish don’t stand a chance.”
While the smaller Furuno 10-inch and 13-inch MFDs have hybrid controls, the new 16-inch, 22-inch, and 24-inch screens have all glass, internal processing system, displays and are all touch control. A bar across the top of the screen features a number of icons, such as events.
“You can drop a point to mark an event,” says Wood. “You can two-finger tap it to go to a single screen, then back to multiple screens.” Swiping in from the sides and bottom brings up control panels for all of the various features.
“This thing is firing on all cylinders,” says Wood. “But I would add that there’s no substitute for looking out the window.”
Learn more about the product here.
