Nick_H
Well-Known Member
Not being the sharpest knife in the draw, we set off for Sardinia with only a Med France card in the plotter, so I ran out of chart in Porto Cervo and spent a few days navigating with just the ipad and the Navionics HD app. Wow, it's superb, and other than not being linked to the autopilot is light years ahead of my 10 year old Furuno plotter. Add to this that one of the plotters tracker balls has stopped working (if you could ever say this awful piece of design "worked") and the other unit gets too hot to touch, and I think it's time to upgrade the nav kit.
What I loved about using the ipad is the ability to instantly zoom in to any area of the screen to look in more detail at a potential hazard on our route, or to see if a bay will be suitable for anchoring, then just as instantly zoom back out again. The clunky bit about older plotters is the time it takes to move the cursor to the bit you're interested in, as well as the painfully slow (in comparison) redraw rates.
To get the pinch to zoom functionality as per the ipad, it seems you need one of the new glass bridge type plotters, and I don't want to spend that type of money on a new system, as i'm no technophile and i'll have to upgrade the radar side as well, as my current scanner is analogue.
What I have found is dealers selling off Raymarine E120W touch screen kit as I guess it has been superceded by the new E/G series and the even newer glass bridge stuff. Because the surrounds are smaller, I can go from 10" Furuno to 12" Raymarine screens with only the need to cut a slightly bigger aperture in the dash, nothing else needs moving to make space. It should be plug and play with the autopilot and other instrumentation as that is Raymarine already. It doesn't have pinch to zoom, but you can at least touch the screen at the point of interest and hit the zoom button, which seems like it would be the next best thing.
I use the radar so infrequently in the med, as we hardly ever get fog, that I think i'll just fit a small 4kw HD radome, rather than splashing out on an open array scanner.
So, does anyone have anything good or bad to say about the E120W or the HD radome, or are there any better products at comparable cost (2 x 12" plotters and a 4 KW scanner plus ancilliaries should be about £5k total).
What I loved about using the ipad is the ability to instantly zoom in to any area of the screen to look in more detail at a potential hazard on our route, or to see if a bay will be suitable for anchoring, then just as instantly zoom back out again. The clunky bit about older plotters is the time it takes to move the cursor to the bit you're interested in, as well as the painfully slow (in comparison) redraw rates.
To get the pinch to zoom functionality as per the ipad, it seems you need one of the new glass bridge type plotters, and I don't want to spend that type of money on a new system, as i'm no technophile and i'll have to upgrade the radar side as well, as my current scanner is analogue.
What I have found is dealers selling off Raymarine E120W touch screen kit as I guess it has been superceded by the new E/G series and the even newer glass bridge stuff. Because the surrounds are smaller, I can go from 10" Furuno to 12" Raymarine screens with only the need to cut a slightly bigger aperture in the dash, nothing else needs moving to make space. It should be plug and play with the autopilot and other instrumentation as that is Raymarine already. It doesn't have pinch to zoom, but you can at least touch the screen at the point of interest and hit the zoom button, which seems like it would be the next best thing.
I use the radar so infrequently in the med, as we hardly ever get fog, that I think i'll just fit a small 4kw HD radome, rather than splashing out on an open array scanner.
So, does anyone have anything good or bad to say about the E120W or the HD radome, or are there any better products at comparable cost (2 x 12" plotters and a 4 KW scanner plus ancilliaries should be about £5k total).
