Navigating by your Telephone?

E

El and Bill

New member
Good grief! Even Charley Brown would cringe at the thought!

OK - to start with, as many of you know I'm not a 'gizmo' guy. Never paid my saved shekels for a phone with a camera - Why? when my ancient cell phone got better coverage than the expensive new ones (mine had an antenna - fancy that. And I had a fine camera - so saw no need for the new gizmo.

And Apple stuff - a fad. My old Windows on an ancient Dell worked fine (and ran programs Apple couldn't touch).

Alright - now the confession. A kid (who happens to cyber program for the Defense Department and knows something about computers) orders me an iPhone. "you'll find it useful, Dad.".

Well, this post is written on my phone. Some great photos by this phone. BUT - here's the nautical part.

1. An app called latitude we use when cruising to send a GPS location to family every day. We don't file a float plan anymore.

2. Tides - another app gives daily tides just about anywhere.

3. Weather radar - this saved our patooties here on Lake Superior. We 'watched' a severe storm approaching, and tracking it's course relative to our location (accurately known by the phone), got off the lake ahead if the 70 mph winds.

4. Navigation - for about $10 you have all nav charts for the east coast. Kick another 10 and all the Great Lakes or the west coast. They are great backup to chartplotter (should it go out). Shows your location on the chart and is a real navionics chart. Confession - on a lake at Voyageur we used only the phone to navigate (and this is on some of the toughest nav water going - Canadian Shield rocks jutting up vertically, glacial gravel shoals straight up from the bottom, narrow channels between islands, huge glacial boulders in your anchoring cove, etc. The phone took us through this so accurately we never referred to the paper chart except for planning.

There - now I feel better - do I recommend an iPhone or iPad as a boating 'instrument' - you bet! At least consider it as a power source- independent backup and for other mentioned uses. Of course, it's also a phone, connection to Internet (for cruise planning), instant messages (and pictures with family), and link to email and the Brat site. Etc.
 
Love my iPad AND tne Droid phone! We have the Navionics charts on both. A few days ago on the cruise boat we had thunderstorms roll through... I get decent coverage on the lake and used the radar app to pick the safest course. Nice tool.

Now, let me tell you about how great it is to have a fridge on board...

:mrgreen: :mrgreen: :mrgreen:

Best wishes,
Jim
 
El and Bill;
Very good info and review, I may take the plunge and get an Iphone 4 in the near future. Unfortunately the areas where I frequent (Kitimat, Prince Rupert, Bella Bella) do not have very good cell phone coverage making some of the marine apps useless.
Thanks;
wapiti
 
Just tried to buy an Iphone4 on the internet, 3 week wait which didn't bother me but the ATT site couldn't process my info. Called the 800 apple number and they said they couldn't do it either, that I'd have to go to the Apple Store.

The nearest one is 75+ miles away, guess I'll have to wait... :x

Charlie
 
Very interesting commentary from Bill but still not enough to get me to give up my Blackberry, the 4 year old one that works quite well. That said, there is always an iPhone on the boat at all times as the rest of the family use them.

What are the specific radar, GPS and nav apps that people find most useful?
 
I have a new Driod X. Still learning how to work it. How do I get to the place where I can select the Navtronix app (or radar, AIS, etc) for download.

Sorry to be such a luddite :-)
 
Jim - the 'location' is built into the iPHONE. From the App Store built into the phone, I have downloaded Navionics Charts and "tide app" - for the weather radar I use accuweather.com and activecaptain.com as clickables on the home screen that go directly to the internet sites (as I do for C-Brats also).
 
Bill --

Thanks. Now you have provided enough info and utility that I am going to have to play with my wife's iPhone. I can clearly see the utility of weather radar on the iPhone. I use the Furuno 1834 radar for storms but that only goes out 36 miles and it would be really nice if it was easy to see the storms further out and get a sense of their direction. The iPhone should do that. Thanks for the response and for starting the thread.

Jim
 
I use Evernote and Road trip for auto and boat service details plus IFish. On level 5 out of 8 with 1835 points needed to go the next level. I listen to audiobooks and now Audible has its own app and easier to use than the Music app. I rarely use my HP calculator with RPN since there are many free RPN calc apps all with just an ITouch,
 
Hi Folks,

Thanks Bill. No question that the phones and other electronic equipment is coming FAST at us. A friend of mine has a new Chartplotter/GPS he bought in Florida. On the boat it is great. He bought it for it's land capabilities. Best one he has ever seen.

The problem is that as soon as we walk out of the store and take ten steps, the thing would be considered OLD and OUT OF DATE.

I just purchased a new ACER Laptop with WINDOWS 7. Wife saw it and in three weeks HAS TO HAVE ONE.

I like to wait for the prices to come down, which in some cases is only a week. The new computer cost less than half of the one it replaced.

Fred
 
Well, I just ordered a Droid X. Couldn't get anyone to respond about the Iphone4. We'll see how the Droid does, Jim TXSD seems to like his and that's good enough for me!

Charlie
 
Charlie is the Droid for Sprint or another phone serv? We have Sprint serv and we can get Blackberry's right now but I might hold out for a Droid if I can get it? My phone do nothing but make phone calls so I need to get into the 21 century .Jim does your droid do what theIphone does with navigation and weather?
 
What fun

I have a Droid X and just used the generic internet browser to go to http://earthnc.com/mobile No cost. It has a google earth based map with the nautical charts overlaid on the satelite photos. If you zoom in on an area far enough, you will get to the raster chart layer. All the details of the charts (including all notes, etc) perfectly aligned with the satellite picture. You can move around and zoom in and out, etc. Can't beat the price :-)

earthnc.com also has a free version for your desktop computer with the same functionality (http://earthnc.com).
 
jennykatz":2slfzui8 said:
Charlie is the Droid for Sprint or another phone serv? We have Sprint serv and we can get Blackberry's right now but I might hold out for a Droid if I can get it? My phone do nothing but make phone calls so I need to get into the 21 century .Jim does your droid do what theIphone does with navigation and weather?
Click to expand...

There are a variety of Android based phones available on Sprint also. The HTC Evo is a particularly nice one.
 
I haven't tried any of the navigation software yet but so far I really love my Droid X and I will definitely use it for backup navigation. It also surprised me by having better voice quality than the Blackberry storm. Which makes it the first phone in about 10 years that does not have poorer voice quality than one it replaced.

So far I have used it for vehicle navigation, listened to an audio book and music, and it has a big enough screen to actually see photos. Been using voice search a lot and making notes with a voice to text app.
 
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