Navigating with a MacBook - is it worth it?

[Colvic Watson]

Currently we use a couple of iPad's as our plotters and they are superb, running Navionics they make a near perfect and very stress free plotter. I've just bought a Macbook Pro, one of the older ones with a big disk etc. Is it worth setting it up as a plotter? The only frustrating thing about the iPad is the lack of AIS overlay, if I used the Macbook I'd need a USB GPS and how would I get the AIS NMEA data into the Mac? What charts should I use and how much are they? Or should I just carry on using the iPad and ignore AIS overlay - we have a separate Matsutec AIS display.

 

[southseaian]

I shall watch this thread with interest.
I've used Windows laptops with solid state hard drives a fair amount with various charting/navigation software.
I would have liked to have used a Mac Book but never found any software that would work with Apple OS. (apart from using Parallels or similar)
Is comparable software now available?

(Spinning type hard drives should not be used and will be damaged sooner or later if used underway)

 

[nathanlee]

Currently we use a couple of iPad's as our plotters and they are superb, running Navionics they make a near perfect and very stress free plotter. I've just bought a Macbook Pro, one of the older ones with a big disk etc. Is it worth setting it up as a plotter? The only frustrating thing about the iPad is the lack of AIS overlay, if I used the Macbook I'd need a USB GPS and how would I get the AIS NMEA data into the Mac? What charts should I use and how much are they? Or should I just carry on using the iPad and ignore AIS overlay - we have a separate Matsutec AIS display.

I've done just this, though I don't intend to use the MacBook for at-sea navigation due to it being a £1200 laptop that's allergic to water, and a power hungry one at that.

What you'll need is a way to get AIS and GPS information over wifi. The alternative is to plug stuff in to the macbook directly I suppose, but given how often I'd unplug it I decided that was a non-starter in my case.

In short, my setup has a very low powered PC hidden away out of sight behind the switch panel, which is running kplex, a truly wonderful bit of code written by laika of this parish (a thousand thank you's). The GPS & AIS output of my Standard Horizon GX2200e pumps data in to the kplex server using an RS232 to USB converter cable (about £15, make sure it's an FTDI chip for technical reasons). kplex then sends out the NMEA data over wifi and both my macbook and android tablet can read it. You could achieve the same result with a different setup, I just picked the combined GX2200e because it made life simple.

Chart plotting software is a bigger problem. Not a lot support AIS overlay. I didn't investigate chart plotters for the macbook in too much detail as I never intended to use it for nav (just debug/hacking) but openCPN with outdated CM93 charts seem to work fine, and I can pick up AIS targets.

Memory Map, which I run on the tablet will take an NMEA input, but I find the software to be dreadfully awful to use to have binned that idea. I'm currently running Navionics which doesn't support AIS/NMEA input, but is generally a much better chart plotting package. There are loads of free AIS radars and similar out there though and it's not hard to swap between apps - just slightly annoying that one has to given how easy it would be for navionics to implement this.

In short, unless you're a techie geek then this will be a bit of a nightmare to implement, and given the fragility/expense of a MacBook I'd recommend sticking to just using the tablet. Still, if you do choose to jump in feet first, there's plenty of folk that have done similar on this forum so I'm sure there's plenty of support to be had.

 

[Colvic Watson]

Thanks both of you. To be honest it just seems like too much trouble when the iPad works so darned well with Navionics - when the heck are they going to add AIS?

We'll use it on board for movies and internet TV!

 

[Adjag]

We use an iPad as our primary plotter but with iNavX which allows the iPad to link via WiFi so it can display ais data (and other information eg wind from the boat's nmea if you want to). We keep it at the chart table and drive a NASA repeater above decks so that you get simple nav instructions when helming. A shipmodul miniplex does the WiFi job & it's all been trouble free (so far!)

 

[Colvic Watson]

The shipmodul is a superb piece of kit, but it's £300. Why are NMEA over wifi boxes so insanely expensive?

 

[BelleSerene]

Thanks both of you. To be honest it just seems like too much trouble when the iPad works so darned well with Navionics - when the heck are they going to add AIS?We'll use it on board for movies and internet TV!

 

[laika]

As well as the dodgy cm93s, proper charts should be possible with OpenCPN on Mac using the s63 plugin but unless you sail in a very small area the prices for those charts may make that solution non-viable (they are "proper" proper charts). MacENC seems to be one of the main players in the paid-for software for mac department:
http://www.gpsnavx.com/MacENC
I have no personal experience but it seems you can use Navionics/x-traverse charts with it as you do with iNavX. It claims to do AIS overlay.

An alternative would of course be to obtain a copy of Windows and run it in parallels/VMware fusion/virtual box which then permits you to use the Windows version of OpenCPN with the visitmyharbour charts. Windows would be the big cost there unless you can obtain a licence by some other means.

If you plug a serial-to-usb adapter into OS X 10.9, ftdi-based devices seem to work out of the box, others you need to add drivers for. No idea what the situation is like in Yosemite.

Personally I'm with Nathan (and thanks for the kind words on kplex) on the low-power box hidden away and distributing data via IP-over-wifi (I'm currently using a raspberry pi v2: *much* better than the v1). Not only does that make your NMEA data available to tablets and phones without the need for your mac to be switched on, it means you don't have to keep plugging cables in and out. You don't have to worry so much about driver availability when upgrading your laptop OS (see the recent thread on alfa/wifi-bat drivers not working with Yosemite: http://www.ybw.com/forums/showthread.php?433466-Wifi-booster-aerial&p=5344219#post5344219) and you can use it for distributing other types of data: My recent experimentation with the boat-data raspberry pi has been with distributing DVB streams using tvheadend https://tvheadend.org. Still display it on the mac (using VLC) but don't have to trail an antenna over to it or muck about with mac drivers.

Why are multiplexers so expensive? Well the hardware is hopefully better than a couple of dodgy serial-to-usb dongles (they're normally properly opto-isolated), they have to make a profit, and it's presumably not that high volume a market in the grand scheme of things. But it was a reaction to the cost ("'Ow Much? How hard can it be?") and the rubbishness of the software in one of the early commercial solution which made me look at writing a free alternative.