Geoff Schultz wrote in
:

Why are you making up this kind of statement when you clearly don't
have any proof of this. I suspect that he's most likely feeding
garbage to the chartplotter and it won't/can't draw the chart,
leading to the blanking. I can easily imagine this happening if the
lat/long is changing too rapidly for the system to redraw. When the
lat/long changes slowly enough, that's when he sees his position jump.
You can't expect to feed garbage to a system and have it behave
"correctly" when the lat/long change delta exceeds anything
reasonable.


He's not in court, yet, so we don't have to "prove" anything to you or
anyone.

Any REASONABLE system would WARN you that it is receiving "garbage" with
some kind of error message on the BLANK SCREENS....instead of just
leaving you there, in the dark, wondering if you're gonna run over a
rock or bouy....

How slow is slow enough for it to render the chart? 5 seconds? 30? a
minute?

There's gotta be some kind of ERROR - WARNING timeout, right? I didn't
see one in the video, just a blank screen saying nothing....

Today, while letting Navicore plot my course to a country church in the
boonies to fix their organ, I was thinking about this thread and those
videos how thankful I was my $200 Nokia N800 Linux tablet and $100 Nokia
12-channel WAAS GPS tiny puck laying up on the dash didn't act this way.

If I boot Maemo Mapper and steal mosaic data from Micro$oft's Virtual
Earth composite through the cell phone, even going through heavy trees
and with the roof of the car causing a large obstruction aft of my
position from its GPS vantage point on top of the dash, I couldn't help
but be pleased as this freeware hacker program downloaded from maemo.org
perfectly plotted my course accurate to the center of the lane in the 4-
lane highway I was driving down at 60+ mph, far faster than a sailboat
needs.

http://maemo.org/downloads/product/OS2007/maemo-mapper/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N800
http://www.flickr.com/photos/teddythebear/149479767/

My LD-3W tiny pocket GPS is much more sensitive and accurate than my
Garmin 185, even with the new Garmin antenna. It cold starts in about
30 seconds and just simply receives much better than any handheld I've
ever owned or seen. Also, being a bluetooth device, separate from the
displaying computer, your not forced to have the display anywhere near
where there's a clear view to the birds....wirelessly! It runs 15 hours
on a charge or you can just leave it plugged into 12V permanently. It
uses a common Nokia Li-Ion cellphone battery. I get about 20' range
between the units.

OK, this ISN'T a marine GPS device. What use is it on the boat?......

Open Google Earth on your computer and zoom in on any waterway with it.
Look at the ICW anywhere in the country, for instance. Zoom in close on
the ICW and look at the waterway from above.....

Now, compare this real satellite photo with the regular old marine chart
on your chart plotter. Wouldn't it be great if you could have both?
For about $350, you can! The Nokia N800 Linux tablet uses bluetooth to
connect to your cellphone and uses the cellphone for internet
service...as well as wifi. It's wifi sensitivity FAR exceeds any
laptop, too, but that's for the marina, we're in the ICW. If your
cellphone can make a call, the internet tablet can connect directly to
Google Earth, Virtual Earth and many other feeds for satellite photos,
street maps, topographical maps over the cellphone data link. You don't
need to buy data plugs with 5-year-old charts on them that are no longer
valid, anyways. You don't need to feed Garmin to open up the old charts
preprogrammed into last year's handheld or fixed mount. The satellite
photos Maemo Mapper operate on are a few months old. It's NOT realtime,
but its a helluva lot more up-to-date than that chart plug you just
bought from Waste Marine.

Zoom Google Earth in on some area from directly overhead and look
closely at the waterway. We'll look at the chart to see the bouy
positions, which don't change much. We'll look at the satellite photo
to see what's up ahead, A REAL PICTURE of it! Imagine Google Earth in
portable computer that also PUTS YOU EXACTLY WHERE YOU ARE IN THAT
WATERWAY. It's so close you can see yourself changing lanes on the
interstate. It's so close you can see which parking space you put the
car into in any parking lot. Is that good enough for navigation? Yes,
it is. It won't see another boat because it's not realtime. But, it
will get you on your side of the channel in the fog.

The tablet is also a full-blown Linux computer that will do email, web
browsing, run hundreds of programs the hackers have ported to it. It
just got Abiword from the Linux community, a full featured word
processor (www.abiword.com) Go download the Windows version for your
laptop or home computer. It will do things Microsoft Word won't do for
FREE! There's a full Gnutella spreadsheet so complex I don't know what
all it can do. It came from Linux, too. The tablet can check your
email while navigating the waterways on Maemo Mapper, simultaneously.

Well, please don't slam me for showing you this. I don't care if you
like it or not, really. But, others may find it quite useful, both on
the boat and in their world.....