On Tue, 23 Mar 2010 13:33:00 -0700 (PDT), Tim
wrote:
On Mar 23, 12:27*pm, "CalifBill" wrote:
"Tim" wrote in message
...
OK, *While the wife was shopping this afternoon, I came across the
Magellan Tritons, and wondered what they do and if anyone has had much
experience with *them. I like the idea that they are waterproof, but
am wondering if I actually have a need for one.
http://www.gpsmaniac.com/2009/04/mag...ver-the-basics...
for the boat I would get a chart plotter. *Not Garmin. *Garmin's are very
good, but they are extremely proud of their charts. *Maybe 3x the costs of
Navionic's etc. *Depending where you boat. *I think they are almost a
requirement for boating. *Paper charts are great, and I have them for all
the places I boat, but the plotter has phone numbers for the marina's, etc.
and is easy in a smaller boat to plot your courses as does not require a
large flat surface to lay out the paper charts. You can get plotters pretty
cheap these days. *Want a decent plotter, but older, look at used and those
updating their electronics. I have a Garmin GPSmap 162 on my boat and am
replacing it with a new combo unit. *It may sell for $50 realistically these
days. *Black and white,and will take Garmin charts, but is to slow with the
really good detail charts, but fine with the roads and recs CD charts.
Oh boy. More stuff to investigate.
Thanks Bill!
Bill makes a good point regarding the price of electronic charts. We
use 2 kinds of electronic charts on the trawler: BSB charts in
Maptech format which are essentially free, and work on any PC based
charting software; and CMAP-NT chart chips which work in our Furuno
plotter and many others. The CMAP chips are not free but they are
reasonably priced. All of the CMAP charts that we've used on 2,000
nautical miles of our current Caribbean cruise are contained on two
chips, each costing abot $200, and each containing the equivalent of
hundreds of paper charts.
The inland river charts for the US are available from the Corps of
Engineers for free in something called S57 format. There is good,
free charting software available for S57 format called OpenCPN. Even
if you don't want to carry a laptop on the boat, PC based charting
makes a good planning tool and is great winter entertainment. More
than one of our cruises has started out that way.
http://www.agc.army.mil/echarts/inlandnav/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/opencpn/