iPad not fit for navigation purposes

[steve yates]

Just seen further down the thread your preference is a plotter, which is fine, but I'd hardly call an ipad a cheap nav system! With ipads, chart updates are continous and a breeze, something that could turn out to be a useful safety feature. Everyone has opinions on what they trust and don't, yours is a perfectly valid pov, though I may not particularly agree with it. Refusing to go aboard another boat where they use an ipad as a nav system though seems rather limiting. A rigid mind set is probably far more dangerous at sea than any choice of nav system.

 

[ashtead]

A great advantage of the iPad once you have one is how reasonable navionics updates are compared to rip off prices for reymarine updates. If you are lucky enough to have an iPad Pro keep it below and pair it with the latest ray marine offering but use navionics for any detailed work. I suspect an iPad works out at only a few years worth of raymarine updates if buying secondhand. Also you cannot sit in the garden with the chart plotter really.

 

[FinesseChris]

I met a Swede who'd sailed from home to Boulogne with only a road atlas. Road maps shouldn't be discounted, though. A friend we were sailing with found the gap in the wall outside Honfleur on his road map that didn't appear on the Admiralty chart. It gives a usable short cut to the west .

Some bloke who bought an old steel ketch on our mooring set off with a road atlas to get from Chi to the Thames. Sadly the road atlas had not heard of the Owers.

 

[Rappey]

Most of you youtube sailing chanels use a tablet over a chart plotter.
The pinch and zoom and scroll speed of a tablet is superb. I would make a guess this could be a reason as to why many prefer tablets .
Google satellite view gives a very good visual perception that you just can't get from a chart.

 

[Daverw]

Most of you youtube sailing chanels use a tablet over a chart plotter.
The pinch and zoom and scroll speed of a tablet is superb. I would make a guess this could be a reason as to why many prefer tablets .
Google satellite view gives a very good visual perception that you just can't get from a chart.

Is that possibly that costs for chart areas significantly lower and can be downloaded easier when cruising large areas than SD cards for chart plotters

 

[Jamie Dundee]

The pinch and zoom and scroll speed of a tablet is superb.

I have to say that touch screen is not my favourite at sea. My Simrads have touch screens with pinch to zoom etc but when the boat is moving I much prefer to use the rotary knob and buttons, more accurate when bouncing around. Also being able to overlay radar and ais on the chart is a bonus.

 

[prv]

The pinch and zoom and scroll speed of a tablet is superb. I would make a guess this could be a reason as to why many prefer tablets .

Not really, since a modern plotter is exactly the same for zooming and scrolling. It’s hardly fair to compare a 2020 iPad to a 2006 Raymarine C70.

Pete

 

[Rappey]

I went into a chandlery recently and had a look at the plotters. They were Laggy and low res compared to a tablet.
What are the specs for display, memory and cpu on a plotter ? Maybe that might convince me .

I have to say that touch screen is not my favourite at sea.

I do agree with your reasons .
WiFi can overlay whatever is needed.

Is that possibly that costs for chart areas significantly lower and can be downloaded easier when cruising large areas than SD cards for chart plotters

It could be , but a fair amount of them are showing both

 

[Buck Turgidson]

Not really, since a modern plotter is exactly the same for zooming and scrolling. It’s hardly fair to compare a 2020 iPad to a 2006 Raymarine C70.

Pete

9" B&G zeus3 720 x 1280 with 10Hz refresh rate. costs 1.5 times as much as the highest spec 12.9" iPad pro which has a 2732x2048 screen and will update 4Kvideo at 30Hz and has a TB of memory.

Exactly the same? I assume you haven't done a side by side comparison. I have.

 

[GHA]

Most of you youtube sailing chanels use a tablet over a chart plotter.

The majority of cruisers seem to have a tablet or laptop for nav, being a pragmatic bunch they don't throw the baby out with the bathwater

Must cost a fortune to upgrade plotter chips every time you move to a new part of the globe, plus a pain trying to get anything delivered in much of the world.

Does no one actually write passage plans anymore so you're all reliant on a screen to get where you're going?

 

[MarkCX]

Tablets and phones are just more tools in the toolbox and increase redundancy - a good thing.

In addition to paper charts (and knowing how to use them), I have a plotter below and a handheld GPS with charts in the cockpit that lasts ages on a couple of AA batteries.

But none of those are as quick and easy to use than an app on a phone or tablet. As for passage planning, the iPad lets me do this anywhere, including the pub. All the information I need, tide, currents, weather, port/anchorage details etc. Just a matter of jotting it down for a paper copy.

There are downsides though, including battery life, viewability and protection from the elements- all of which can be overcome.

If I had to choose one of the pieces of technology though... handheld Garmin.

 

[fredrussell]

I’ve used iPads with Navionics on last three boats, but will be moving over to a Garmin chart plotter later this year. The reasons being: I want something permanently plumbed in to boats electrical supply, no more dangling charging cable with Apple’s AWFUL lightning plug on it. I want something that is fully waterproof without the need for a separate case to provide this, and lastly I want something I can view in bright sunlight without some sort of shading contraption used. I’ll keep the iPad, and I like navionics, but the above three points are very important to me. A Toughbook would mostly be good I accept, but I have a huge aversion to the world of Microsoft and Windows.

 

[ditchcrawler]

I have a chart plotter at the helm which is invaluable. However I also use Navionics on my I pad which is often handy on short trips and particularly when I go on other boats. I am fortunate that my Navionics charts were very cheap. I don't pay for the updates each year but I do update my waypoints for entrances etc here on the east coast.
In the past I also had the Imray charts on my I pad but these expired. However I recently updated my East Coast Pilot to the 5th edition by Garth Cooper and Dick Holness and that includes a code to get the Imray Charts North Sea area for free covering east coast up to Scotland, some of the south coast and Holland and Belgium. You can get it for about £20 on Amazon . A bargain.

 

[prv]

Exactly the same? I assume you haven't done a side by side comparison. I have.

Not "exactly the same" in all respects, only for zooming and scrolling charts. And yes, I have both the Navionics app on my iPad and an Axiom 9" plotter, and regardless of the underlying hardware specs the experience of scrolling and zooming is functionally the same.

In some other aspects the iPad is better, in others (for example, radar and autopilot integration) the plotter is. It doesn't have to be a childish competition where one device's dad is bigger than the other's in every respect.

Pete

 

[RupertW]

I have a chart plotter at the helm which is invaluable. However I also use Navionics on my I pad which is often handy on short trips and particularly when I go on other boats. I am fortunate that my Navionics charts were very cheap. I don't pay for the updates each year but I do update my waypoints for entrances etc here on the east coast.
In the past I also had the Imray charts on my I pad but these expired. However I recently updated my East Coast Pilot to the 5th edition by Garth Cooper and Dick Holness and that includes a code to get the Imray Charts North Sea area for free covering east coast up to Scotland, some of the south coast and Holland and Belgium. You can get it for about £20 on Amazon . A bargain.

I will never understand the need for a screen at the helm rather than at the chart table but many people find them invaluable as you suggest so there must some function that I don’t need or am just not aware of. It may be an age thing - I would have been thrilled to know exactly where I was every 3 hours or so for my first couple of decades of sailing so 10 or 15 minutes since a last check seems like a unnecessary luxury. Except in deep fog and there I admit it must be nice.

 

[ditchcrawler]

My first proper trip some 50 years ago was to Cherbourg . We had a trailing log which got fouled with weed. We plotted EPs doing dead reckoning.
We also had an RDF with a headset and a compass with the ferrite rods. I tried this and when I plotted my cocked hat we were somewhere near Paris.
We just aimed up tide of the entrance turned and followed the 5 fathom line and arrived OK. Simples.

 

[Rappey]

A plotter is weatherproof (so are some tablets) the only win is that they can be seen in sunlight ( but that can be worked around with a tablet)
Tablet charts are a fraction of the plotter chart prices and tablets are a fraction of the price of a chart plotter. Many android devices also have the correct software built in to work with nmea !
Add a £50 yakker and your nmea is sent via WiFi to tablet/phone.
I suspect most using a tablet or phone also have a dedicated chart plotter but prefer the ease of use of a handheld device

 

[duncan99210]

Plotter at the helm v at the chart table: I’ve got plotters at both at the moment but when the time comes to replace the current system I will have a plotter at the helm only. That’s where it can deliver data to the helm without having to dive down to the chart table to find out where we are as we enter some strange place. I can also see the radar and AIS when the visibility is pants. The chart table is where the paper charts live along with the log book: a plotter down there is nice but not required.

Ipad v plotter: horses for courses. The plotter at the helm is my go to source of position, course and other vessel information. It’s weatherproof, easy to read in the sunlight and displays just about everything I might need to know. The iPad is great, has fully updated charts, is portable and provides a very flexible planing tool but it isn't easy to read in bright sunlight, needs a bulky case to be weatherproof and needs a charging lead to keep up with power consumption.
So, I use the plotter for live navigation but the iPad for planing and informing the quick decisions you need to make about course changes: do we grab the chance for a sail and go round the outside of Lefkada island or do we go through the canal? Will there be enough light to make our way into Sivota when we get there if we go round the island? It’s the work of a couple of minutes to get those answers with the iPad whereas it might take 10 - 15 minutes to get the same answers with the plotter or pencil and paper.

All that said, there’s no single ”right” answer, everything is down to personal preference and the depth of your pocket. If my pockets were deeper than they are, I’d cheerfully have modern MFDs at helm and chart table displaying all the data I want, the software on them would replicate the flexibility of the iPad without the its downsides and so on. But I don’t, so the compromise I make at the moment is a legacy system with plotters at helm and chart table with the iPad providing planning and backup.

 

[samfieldhouse]

I experimented with iPad navigation this week. I've just upgraded to an EchoMap 65 as my primary plotter. However my Quark Elec nmea multiplexer spits ais/gps/etc over wifi too so hooked it up to my iPad to see what it was like.
Navionics do an excellent free trial and the Imray Navigator app is free, as are charts if you buy a new set of Imray paper charts (which I have).
I enjoyed the pinch to zoom and the ability to easily move around an Imray chart with AIS overlayed.
But in the cockpit, my iPad also over heated and shut down. Granted it was HOT this weekend, it was charging and wifi was on which will all make it hotter - but because that risk exists, I wouldn't rely on it.
And charts are expensive - it frustrates me that on my EchoMap i have a set of BlueCharts, but my 'license' for these isn't swappable to Navionics... I'd have to effectively buy them again. Another nail in the coffin.
I'll keep the ipad to hand n the cockpit for the benefit of having digital versions of charts - it saves having paper charts int he cockpit - but It wont be replacing my Garmin.

 

[MarkCX]

Due to the prohibitive costs of keeping dedicated plotter charts up to date, I use the iPad charts which are cheap enough to keep updated, to double check my route and plan to make sure nothing has changed.