Chart Plotters

[Bluediamond]

Hello everyone,
I’m a C Brat virgin!!!! Getting ready to purchase my first boat ever, and yes it’s going to be a 25 cruiser, 2006👍 My question is, the Standard Horizon is an older model and I’d like to replace it with a new one, any recommendations, most of my boating will be on rivers and in and around the Great Lake regions.

[JonO]

Following, as I may be in the market for new electronics at some point soon.

I am curious about whether you've considered using a GPS-enabled tablet and the Navionics app? It might be a good first-or second screen solution depending on what other gear you have on your boat.

https://www.navionics.com/usa/apps/navionics-boating

JonO

[hardee]

[Robert H. Wilkinson]

I have a 5" Standard Horizon combo plotter/fish finder and have been very happy with it. Originally I requested a Raymarine but dealer was out of stock when rigging my boat so parts guy recommended the Standard Horizon. It was more money but came with the Great Lakes platinum card and he said that it had a faster redraw rate which is good with the smaller screens.

Rob

[JonO]

It looks from their website like Standard Horizon is no longer making plotters? All of their models on their webstie are in "archive" and this year's product catalog is all VHF radios...

https://www.standardhorizon.com/?cmd=DisplayProducts&DivisionID=3&ProdCatID=84

[thataway]

Reading your initial post, it appears that you want to replace a Standard Horizon chart plotter. Harvey asked about a VHF radio. Perhaps some of the confusion is that Standard Horizon is better known for its radios than chart plotters. The last SH chart plotter I had was about 18 years ago. They still appear to make them. However the newer chart plotters by Garmin, RayMarine, and Lowrance/Simrad I believe eclipse the features of the Standard Horizon--especially in the fish finder section. Many new chart plotters have CHIRP, Down scan as well as side scan. With these various features they are better at locating both structure and fish.

If you want to add Radar, then you want to have a chart plotter which is going to be the latest radar comparable. Again, the big 3 are the ones I would consider. Are you going to add an auto pilot? Again that enters in. Garmin probably makes the most useful auto pilot, but they are rather expensive. On the other hand RayMarine has a very good pilot for about half the price. All of the big 3 companies make great products. If possible go to a West Marine store and see which one is easiest for you to use.

My current boat came with RayMarine, and I upgraded to the latest plotter and radar a couple of years ago. Before that I had Garmin for a number of years. I still have Garmin on my 18' catamaran "Day boat". I have found for me that Garmin is most intuitive to use. Garmin now owns Navionics charts and has incorporated them into their most recent models.

Going into the radio slightly beyond what Harvey mentioned is the AIS capability. I have found that to be of great value on the Rivers. It is a safety feature to be able to identify a tug by name, position, speed and heading. Then if necessary you can talk to them directly with AIS ID. There are several Standard Horizon and Icom VHF radios which have screens which are AIS receivers only. Icom has a new radio with a nice size screen and also play back of the last recording. I have used Standard Horizon Radios most of my 70 year boating career, but I have also used Icom ham radios. Both are excellent choices. The higher end will have a loud hailer and fog horn--the fog horn is what you are really after. I have seen some dense fog on many of the rivers, including the Mississippi. and would not have been running without a good chart plotter, radar and AIS reception.

[gulfcoast john]

Congrads on your new ride!

Agree with Bob.

I’d suggest that in those areas, at a minimum you need a working VHF base radio and antenna and some ‘moving map’ nav aid. DSC has been required on ‘new’ radios since 1995, so you likely have that.

Today there are several alternatives to a standalone plotter as JonO suggests.

A common rant among experienced boaters is ‘Garmin/Raymarine/Simrad (less for Furuno) charges $4,000 for this 12” MFD in 2018 and 36 months later won’t stock parts or even tech support for it because it’s ‘legacy’ and then to add insult to injury they charge $400 for a Vision chip of the Gulf Coast. Now my $69 ducer quit and my plotter won’t work with any new depth transducer and they no longer sell any ducer that’s compatible! So, dammit, what I’m a gonna do is go out and buy me a new 2021 $4,900 Garmin MFD!

A great advance in marine electronics was the development of marine networks made of trunk lines with drop cables to multiple sensors. Raymarines Seatalk and Mercrusiers etc were all totally incompatible with others in every imaginable way (and also in many unimaginable ways).

The original 0183 network used a bundle of multicolored TINY wires where each color carried data (as in, pink for fuel level). Later, N2K replaced all that with only 5 pins and digital signals. Garmin (for example) and all others are allowed to have proprietary ‘sentences’ on the network for special unique functions they develop. Those unique sentences allow me to tap an AIS target on my Garmin MFD, which brings up an option to contact the target bridge MMSI number directly with one touch. (Originally, that option was unique to only Garmin GPSMAP MFDs networked to Garmin VHF 200 and above radios). That particular feature would not work if I had a Standard Horizon radio, although the basic MFD features and basic VHF features would still work and not cause other melodrama with other connected sensors on the N2K network.

Ideally.

But we do not live in an Ideal world, as you may have noticed.

Some types of data simply cannot be carried on the N2K network. Anything involving a picture (Radar images, CHIRP images, Sonar images, FLIR images, camera images, video etc) can not be carried on any N2K network. The simple depth number (ie ‘7.5 feet’), AIS position data, engine data like temp and boost pressure and RPMS etc will show up fine. VHF radio antennas must be connected to the radio, not the network. The radio CAN be, and a GPS antenna can be a sensor on the network. All this is ‘to my knowledge’ and ‘as I understand it’ so pipe up when I’m wrong. Eileen always does, so I’m very used to it.

All those images can’t be put on your MFD, but every manufacturer came to the rescue with their own unique proprietary ethernet like cable, thank Goodness! Of course Theirs are not compatible with Yours. Garmin’s looks exactly like a standard computer RJ-45 cable, but my Garmin instruction manual explicitly states, “Don’t even THINK about it, Highsmith!”

In general, you’ll likely be successful in getting any brand AIS and any brand GPS antenna to work with any VHF base radio. I once heard that some Italian guy got a Garmin radar to work with a Raymarine plotter.

Turns out it was the Pope.

Personally, I don’t believe it.

Full disclosure: I’ve always been a Garmin guy and I installed all the electronics, radar mount and piped the engines data onto my (Garmin) N2K network. We’ve found radar and tx/rec AIS to be helpful in our cruising. Garmin’s Auto-guidance, a one touch proposed route from the boat to the destination, is my favorite feature. The current G3 Garmin coastal US and G3 Lakes and Rivers are now only $124 each at Hodges Marine and now include auto-guidance (previously only available on premium, small-area Vision chips). They are not compatible with my MFDs according to Garmin, but they work. Most of the time.

All that is background for some new possibilities!

In the interim, another Italian guy has developed a cell-phone based, (including big Android and Ipad tablets) a truly amazing navigation app called Aqua Map (marine). For an incredible low price (I forget what, but equivalent to a few boxes of wine) he includes all the best navigation data. Like Garmin, he has to pay licensing fees to the ACE for their data, Navionics for theirs, etc etc. Unlike Garmin, the download for all the Great Lakes is $4.99 for 12 months!

We also have Navionics on the same Verizon Android tablet, and it also works well.

All that said, today we cruised down Lake Seneca for 25 miles at 25 MPH through whitecaps, and we used our two big, bright, 12” Garmin screens that we are used to. Because we are used to using them.

We’re lifetime AGLCA members, so we can read their members-only blog site. There is a wealth of information there, including marine electrical engineers and nav program experts. This is a synopsis distilled from what I gather is their consensus on ‘getting past the Big 4 Planned Obsolescence monopoly’ while saving many Boat Units on updated chips and aging plotters.

Android devices treat each AquaMap route turn as a ‘turn’, with unlimited turns per route. Apple devices treat each route deviation as a ‘waypoint’, with a limit of about 200 before running out of memory. Since a gentle curve on a route may have 7 ‘waypoints’ that can happen pretty quick on the Atlantic ICW through the marshes of Georgia.

If you choose an Android tablet, it has cell and GPS included. However, if you choose an Apple tablet, it must have both cell and GPS capability, and some do and some don’t; and the Apple store ‘geniuses’ never seem to get it right regarding your AquaMap app.

We’ve never had an apple we couldn’t eat, but I don’t have a dog in this particular fight.

For the original poster, I would suggest looking for a 5-pin plug on the rear of the plotter that might connect to an N2K network, or could in the future. Some plotters have an internal GPS antenna, some don’t. Agree as so often with Harvey to find the plotter model number.

If you have a working base VHF, antenna and moving map that doesn’t depend on having current cell coverage, you can safely delay your equipment purchase decisions until you decide on your boating style and preferences. At $200 and under, I’d suggest at least a receive-only black box AIS before the expense of radar.

As always and forever, Your Mileage May Differ!

Hope this is helpful!
Cheers and happy outfitting!

John

[ssobol]

[JonO]

As for Apple iPads, only those that are cellular service-capable have internal GPS. You don't need to subscribe to said cell service for the maps to work - but would want to download any maps that you're going to need while you have access to wifi... or through a wifi-enabled hotspot from your phone.

Alternately, I understand that you could add an external bluetooth GPS receiver to a non-GPS iPad if you already have one of those.

Additional info:

https://www.yachtingworld.com/ipad/ipad-sailing-top-tips-tablet-navigation-125489

[curioustraveler]

[JonO]

For those who use iPads... I'm curious about what you're using.... 32GB or 128GB version... and what kind of case for it.

[thataway]

U believe that 32 gig would be fine, I have an I pad pro 12.9" with 256 gig, I have Navionics and Aquamap plus many other apps and there is only about 50 gig used.

[hardee]

Oh WOW, Bob is right, I noticed that you were asking about a plotter but thought you might have been confused because I didn't think there were Standard Horizon plotters in existence any more. Sorry, my bad.

And Yes, SH and ICOM make great VHF's with decent AIS receivers and screens that will give you some relational perspective to positions. ( I have two of them on board, and ICOM M-506 (Primarily my ch16 monitoring VHF), which I highly recommend*, and a Standard Horizon, 2150, which I use for my main VHF com radio.

Plotters, a whole different world. I have for a main plotter a RayMarine C-120, and backup is a Garmin GPSMAP 640. I also use a Samsung S2 Tablet that does have an internal GPS. Important because I often boat where there is NO cell signal so any device that uses cell tower triangulation is useless in that situation. And NO not all Android tablets have internal, stand alone GPS function.

And the concern about dialing down the light level for night use is a very valid point. If you are out in the dark, that screen needs to be so dark that in daylight you would barely be able to see anything on it, if at all.

* The ICOM M-506 also has (as mentioned, a fog/hailer function) but mainly I have it because it has a "Last Call, 2 minute recording feature." A great safety feature IMHO, and it can be turned on and left in that mode always, so you never miss a call detail. Partly because it has such an easy menu to work.

Harvey
SleepyC

[Bluediamond]

Okay, wow, everyone is so in-depth and full of great information. I’ve quickly come to realize that I don’t know sh…, about all of this, but I’m a quick learner. The current owner of the boat doesn’t know the model of the existing
SH. I’ve been playing with the Navionics app for now. When I’m more informed on the current equipment I’ll let you all know. In the meantime can anyone advise me of a way to understand about all the different radio/gps language. Again this is my first boat and I’m learning.
I’ve been looking at 150 miles of Lake Superior from my cliff for too long, it’s time for a boat!!!

[Robert H. Wilkinson]