View Single Post
Old 01-18-2014, 02:53 PM   #6
DavidM
Valued Technical Contributor
 
DavidM's Avatar
 
City: Litchfield, Ct
Join Date: Aug 2012
Posts: 6,784
Eric:

Welcome to Trawler Forum. I have enjoyed you wisdom on boatdiesel, so now is our chance to reciprocate.

And if you get really bored you can participate in some of our more inane discussions- like overpropping for fuel economy, two props vs one, whether it is better to lock or freewheel your non powered twin prop, and other scintillating topics.

But back to your question:

Some laptops suffer from connectivity issues with a USB remote GPS. You can get them to work reliably, but it takes a bit of a kludge- Xport is a small utility that provides a virtual serial port that is reliable.

OpnCpn is my hands down favorite for a free, full featured charting application for PCs. It is well supported by a bunch of gurus on Cruisers Forums.

But for a low cost semi-dedicated chart plotting solution, how about an Android tablet. The Nexus 7 is now in the low $200s and works very well. I have used two different charting apps on it:

MxMariner which is related to OpenCpn for PCs. It works with NOAA downloaded raster or vector charts and is free or nearly free. But it does not cover the Bahamas (easily).

Plan2Nav, a Jeppesen product, is vector based but works well. It uses proprietary Jeppesen charts that you have to pay to download but the whole US east coast and the Bahamas is less than $20. I have skimmed through the Abacos which I know reasonably well and their charts are accurate as far as I can tell.

Plan2Nav lets you download Active Captain crowd sourced data on marinas and anchorages. I found that the Bahamas data is surprisingly accurate and complete.

Both of these are easily downloaded from the Google Play store if you have an android device.

The Explorer based charts are probably better, but I don't know if anyone sells them for a tablet app. And for all I know, that is what Jeppesen uses.

In any case do buy the Explorer paper chartbook if you go down there. It comes in three versions: Abacos, Exumas and Eluthera I think. It shows safe routes across the banks, reliable waypoints and tips for getting there, dealing with customs, weather and the like.

David
DavidM is offline   Reply With Quote