The developer of the Navibox, John Davey of AbbeyCroft Communications Ltd, tells us that he identified the requirement for such a device following the failure at sea of his electronic chart system running on a standard laptop, due to high current drain.

The first thing we did, therefore, when reviewing this 12 volt navigation-dedicated PC, was to check his claims regarding low current usage. This proved to be very impressive, at 0.5 amps on standby, just under 1.0 amp in regular use, and 1.5 amps when the CD or hard disk was accessed. The Navibox comprises a compact PC (65mm x 210mm x 275mm) plus an infrared-operated keyboard/mouse combination – see photograph – but no screen, so the power needs of a user-supplied display has also to be factored in, but even so, an average current consumption of only 1 amp for the PC itself is impressive indeed.

A DVD/CD reader is provided for loading software, and two of the four USB ports are positioned at the front of the unit so that the user can conveniently plug in a USB memory device as an alternative to a floppy drive. Networking and all the other regular features of a modern PC are provided, and a CD burning facility incorporated.

Inside the case the unit looked well put-together, with the single negative observation of cabling running over the top of the processor support chips – this device has no fan and so best practice would be not to impede the air flow over the cooling fins of these chips. (The manufacturer has noted this point.) Even so, our temperature tests produced nothing to worry about even with constant access to the 30 GB hard disk and CD drive.

The X86 processor, 248 MB of RAM and the Micro ATX board booted up the Windows 98 operating system (perfectly adequate for all the navigation applications we could think of) very rapidly indeed, and made short work of accessing and manipulating both the vector and the raster scanned charts which we loaded. On reactivating from standby we did need to restart the GPS, but the PC remembered the port we were using and never ‘lost’ it.

The Navibox proved immune to significant spark-type electrical noise, and our tests with HF in a Winlink/Sailmail type environment failed to upset it.

On testing the response to variation in DC voltage supply from the 12 volt nominal level, the Navibox operated happily down to 10 volts but unfortunately powered-down as soon as the volts increased above 14.6 – a little too low in both our opinion and that of the manufacturer, who has identified a wrongly specified power supply module.