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Old 07-23-2012, 12:21 PM   #3
Marin
Scraping Paint
 
City: -
Join Date: Oct 2007
Posts: 13,745
Classic Yacht Magazine is a beautiful digital magazine. It's free but you do have to sign up for it Classic Yacht Magazine May-June 2012

This is the only marine magazine we "subscribe" to. Basically when you sign up they send you an e-mail telling you the new edition is avaialble on-line. I don't know that they will actually push the new edition to your computer/iPad.

The only marine apps we have and use on our iPad are:

Navimatics which is a charting app (but NOT a navigation app) that we have started using when we're out to provide the "big picture' of the area by letting us zoom in super tight or zoom out super wide with a few finger swipes. This is way faster than pawing through chartbooks (which we still have open at the helm) or trying to zoom around on the GPS plotters. It's $25 or so to get the app for your location (we have the west coast US-Canada version of the app which includes Alaska, too). Great for planning a trip or simply looking around at different places while you're underway. I told Eric Henning about it before he started his run bringing his Willard from their former home in Alaksa down here and he has commented that it proved useful in looking ahead as they went to figure out where they wanted to anchor for the night and so forth.

It interfaces with Active Captain so all the Active Captain info is overlayed on the charts as little colored boxes. Tap the box and the Active Captain data for that location comes up including people's reviews of the marina, anchorage, etc.

Navimatics will show you your track--- the term they use for a line extending out from your vessel symbol showing where you will go on the chart if you continue on your current course----and it will drop a track line behind your boat as you go. The positioning and tracking functions work without a wifi or 3/4G connection BUT you have to have a GPS signal. So far as I know the only iPads with built-in GPS are the ones with both wifi and 3/4G. The wifi-ony models won't locate your boat on the charts unless you can feed an external GPS signal to the iPad. The charts are all there, however, and you can zoom and pan around them and look at details without a GPS signal.

We also have an app called Marine Traffic. This is an app that takes the AIS data from all vessels who are transmitting an AIS signal and diplays it on a chart. It is worldwide--- if you want to see what vessels are going up and down the Thames River in London it will show you that. You pick the part of the world you're interested in and zoom into it.

The ship positions and data are real-time and you DO have to have an active wifi or 3/4G connection to use it. There are a number of similar apps in the app store--- Marine Traffic had the best reviews from professional captains. You can select a vessel on the map, tap it, and all its data comes up including photos of the vessel if someone loaded them. We have not found any value in having an actual AIS transciever on our boat where we cruise, but this iPad app is something of a substitute for the receiving part assuming you have an internet connection.

The third iPad app we have and use is TideTrac. There are a ton of tide and current apps in the store--- this one seemed to be the best in our opinions.
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