Digital Yacht chartplotters

[jwilson]

Last year YM gave the AIS combo 5" chartplotter from Digital Yacht a best buy rating. This model seems to have disappeared from the market, no longer listed on the company website and few available retail, maybe a few older stock ones. Anyone know what is the situation?

May have to replace my 5" Garmin 3005C plotter at the helm as it is now faulty and Garmin will no longer repair it. I need a smallish one only, space on the console situation, and there is a separate bigger plotter at the chart table.

 

[Paul_DY]

Hi Paul from Digital yacht here, yes unfortunately we had to make a hard decision with our SC500 AIS Combo. Unfortunately some of the components had gone end of life and we needed to do a pretty major upgrade to change to new components. In the meantime, despite being the only small chart plotter with built-in GPS and AIS, it was no longer selling as well due to newer cheaper 4" and 5" chart plotters from Garmin, Lowrance, etc.

I would be tempted to go for the latest Garmin Echomap 50s which has built in charts and perhaps couple it with one of our AIS100s.

 

[jwilson]

Hi Paul from Digital yacht here, yes unfortunately we had to make a hard decision with our SC500 AIS Combo. Unfortunately some of the components had gone end of life and we needed to do a pretty major upgrade to change to new components. In the meantime, despite being the only small chart plotter with built-in GPS and AIS, it was no longer selling as well due to newer cheaper 4" and 5" chart plotters from Garmin, Lowrance, etc.

I would be tempted to go for the latest Garmin Echomap 50s which has built in charts and perhaps couple it with one of our AIS100s.

Thanks for your message, and suggestion, but I'm slightly allergic to Garmin as I'm now replacing a Garmin plotter that has twice died though water ingress to a "waterproof" product. First time Garmin did a £200 factory exchange, now that one has died for the same reason and Garmin will not fix/replace. It's not even in a particularly wet place, and flush mounted so connectors at back are always dry.

Does your AIS100 talk to a Standard Horizon - they at least claim a 3 year waterproof warranty?

Pity you don't make it anymore: having sailed with AIS I think it should be an almost automatic feature on chartplotters: could easily build a 6" whip aerial into the GPS section. I'm not that concerned about ships 20 miles away, it's the ones within 1-2 miles that matter.

 

[Paul_DY]

Thanks for your message, and suggestion, but I'm slightly allergic to Garmin as I'm now replacing a Garmin plotter that has twice died though water ingress to a "waterproof" product. First time Garmin did a £200 factory exchange, now that one has died for the same reason and Garmin will not fix/replace. It's not even in a particularly wet place, and flush mounted so connectors at back are always dry.

Does your AIS100 talk to a Standard Horizon - they at least claim a 3 year waterproof warranty?

Pity you don't make it anymore: having sailed with AIS I think it should be an almost automatic feature on chartplotters: could easily build a 6" whip aerial into the GPS section. I'm not that concerned about ships 20 miles away, it's the ones within 1-2 miles that matter.

The Standard Horizon plotters will work perfectly with our AIS receivers and I have actually produced a Tech Note on connecting the CP180/CP300/CP500 plotters to our units.... http://www.digitalyacht.co.uk/files/Tech 00017-2011.pdf