Danny Jo
Active member
Further to my big bang post, I spent most of the afternoon in the local chandlers. I went there to collect a new lifejacket, but as I was greated with "I hear you've taken up swimming recently" (his brother is one of the Beaumaris RNLI crew, damn him), I took my revenge by playing with the Raymarine C80 and E120 on display.
OK, so they are reasonably intuitive, and it's great having the facilities to lock onto a radar target and display AIS data, but:
- to enter text (waypoint and route name, for example) you have to scroll through the whole alphabet, for goodness sake, just like on the Garmins of 1990 vintage;
- there's only one each range and bearing markers
- if you're long-sited, you need your reading glasses.
All this has given me the resolve to spend some serious time getting the old Philips AP Navigator up to scratch - it's a whole lot easier to write a route for it.
PS. Aldi in Bangor still has one or two 7x50 compass binoculars at £49.99. When I asked the cashier for one, he said "They sold out in minutes". "So how come there are three in the display case?" "Oh, they must have come from an inland branch last week."
OK, so they are reasonably intuitive, and it's great having the facilities to lock onto a radar target and display AIS data, but:
- to enter text (waypoint and route name, for example) you have to scroll through the whole alphabet, for goodness sake, just like on the Garmins of 1990 vintage;
- there's only one each range and bearing markers
- if you're long-sited, you need your reading glasses.
All this has given me the resolve to spend some serious time getting the old Philips AP Navigator up to scratch - it's a whole lot easier to write a route for it.
PS. Aldi in Bangor still has one or two 7x50 compass binoculars at £49.99. When I asked the cashier for one, he said "They sold out in minutes". "So how come there are three in the display case?" "Oh, they must have come from an inland branch last week."