Hi Danny, I agree with the other comments that a 12" screen right in front of your face is not great. Blocks your view forward. I find the 7" fine. But a bigger screen is great for laying out a course or looking at things in more detail. For that, I take the output from the chart plotter into a laptop which I keep below (mine is on the top of the icebox, out of the way of splashes, falling off the nav table and out of the sunlight). In addition to the larger screen, a big advantage is that many of the nav programs allow the use of the NOAA raster charts, which are free and also provide a level of detail not present when zoomed out on the vector charts. And of course the updates are free, every year. The chartplotter at the helm is great for keeping the boat going in the right direction, and the breadcrumb trail for getting back to where you started from, but the computer nav programs make it easy to set up a course with waypoints, see the big picture just like with a paper chart, and then zoom in when you need the detail. Other members of this list serve can advice about lots of different program options and computers - I use an old MacAir and MacENC (which is always updated for free - I started using it in 2005, have it installed legally on multiple computers, and never have paid any more than the original purchase) but I'm sure there are excellent programs for the PC as well. If your laptop can establish a local wifi hotspot (Macs do this and probably PC's as well) you can take the USB data coming into the laptop (with a serial to USB converter) and rebroadcast it over your wifi hotspot so you can pick it up on an iPad. MacENC makes this easy - I don't know about other nav programs.
Eric Cat's Paw C&C 35 Mk II Mattapoisett, MA On Sep 24, 2012, at 8:58 PM, cnc-list-requ...@cnc-list.com wrote: > Date: Mon, 24 Sep 2012 20:36:16 GMT > From: "djhaug...@juno.com" <djhaug...@juno.com> > To: cnc-list@cnc-list.com > Subject: Re: Stus-List chartplotter/radar > Message-ID: <20120924.163616.993...@webmail-beta01.vgs.untd.com> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" > > Hello again, Does anyone have any comments about the Standard Horizon Cp590. > It is a 12" chart-plotter and can be had for $1425...bigger is better the > Standard Horizon Cp390i is a 7" version and can be had for under $800 > DannyLolita1973 Viking 33South Coast, MA > _______________________________________________ This List is provided by the C&C Photo Album http://www.cncphotoalbum.com CnC-List@cnc-list.com
