TonyS
Well-Known Member
AIS is only really needed when crossing the channel shipping lanes. We have a £120 Advansea connected to the laptop running OpenCPN and GPS from the Garmin handheld. The only other time we tried it was crossing the Loire. We found it much more stable than MARPA despite having the smart heading sensor. When it was good vis on the way back we didn't bother with MARPA but did observe one ship only turning on their AIS when we were 5 miles away and again turning it off after we had passed!
