I had to wait a long time until Hella finally released the Tri-Color LED with anchor light. Back in 2005 I had replaced the conventional Aquasignal 50s on port, starboard and stern with the NaviLEDs from Hella, which had just been released in New Zealand. They are made in New Zealand and were first brought onto the market there. There was also a great introductory price back then.
The conventional lamps were always extremely unreliable, were always full of water, had corrosion problems and always burned out when shaken in the sea. That was all a thing of the past with the Hella LED lamps; they are bright, clearly visible and simply always work.
At that time there were no steamer lights or three-color lanterns, so they remained conventional. As an anchor light we had a pre-heatable LED lantern anyway, and the steamer light is only on when the engine is running anyway, so power consumption hardly plays a role. It also worked reasonably reliably further away from the wet element.
The three-color lantern was a bit of a problem in terms of power consumption because it was always on many nights on long journeys and that's exactly where you would have wanted the LEDs. But as I said, the priority was reliability first and then consumption.
But now the reliability of the conventional three-color lamp was increasingly becoming a problem: Even at the top, at a height of 21 m, there was corrosion and the plastic had received so much UV that it became very brittle and the base and housing had to be glued several times.
AquaSignal had had an LED three-color lantern for a while and even had a compatible quick-out socket, but that had proven to be more of a problem.
So Hella has brought this new three-color lantern onto the market just in time for me. Of course, we haven't had much experience with it yet, but it is just as sealed as the other lamps and seems safe and easy to install.
As far as the light output is concerned, I can't say yet, but if it's just as good as the other NaviLeds, then it's certainly as good as the conventional lantern.
Interestingly, Hella also used different technology for the different sectors. Red and green are each formed by strong individual LEDs with a reflector, the white aft sector is created by two vertical stripes with 4 LEDs each and limiting panels. For the anchor light, 12 x 2 LEDs are arranged in a ring, more similar to Lobolight.
A lower possible heel angle was often critical with LED lanterns. Regarding this, I measured the beam angle and was pleasantly surprised.
Red and green: +/- 27.5 degrees very sharply defined, very evenly illuminated.
White sector: +/- 28 degrees slightly less clearly defined
Anchor light: +/- 10 degrees some spotty light throw
All in all a good impression and the price is also acceptable.