A friend has asked if you can get TomTom for use on a yacht. Preferrably with the whole nautical / ocean thing going on.

I doubt he'd need the speed camera overlay option. Do they do an iceberg option ?

 

There are plenty of GPS's designed for yachts. Try the Garmin(SP?) web page. However I have not seen anything my TomTom in my shop.

 

theres a whole plethera of gps navigators which link to chartplotters,rader etc , straight to your steering if you wish.Are your asking wether its possible to take it out the car and plug it into the boat.?



wouldnt be surprised if 'tom-tom' was a division of Garmin or one of the others.

 

I'm off to a regatta at the weekend, so I'll ask some of the racers there what they use and what they like/dislike about them.

The boat I was staying on simply used a Garmin GPS system, so nothing too fancy. Probably as it's mainly used in Lake Ontario, so it's not too difficult to get lost

 

Most equivalent marine based systems are heading towards PC based systems coupled to a GPS device, with maybe a hardware plotter for backup. You can install several com ports on the PC and then hook up all the instruments that can converse by NMEA.

There are several systems available:

http://www.mrmarine.com.au/nav_software.htm

My old man uses Navmaster on his boat. In theory (if you trusted it!) the PC can steer the boat from start to finish, taking into consideration tides etc. as it can read all the instruments.

Navmaster uses actual scans of admiralty charts, so you can order just about every chart printed. Other systems use vector charts, there are pros cons to each, but basically you need to buy charts on an ad hoc basis, the more detailed you require the more you need, unlike road based sytems that come equipped with a fixed scale map of the whole country.

 

cheaper option... take a navigation course...


M

 

OMG

Yes, not tom tom as such, but there are plenty of chartplotters - they normally run on a laptop and interface to a proper GPS system. Gps systems from the usual people like garmin, but better installed with a proper antenna than the portable variety. Can't think of any of the brand names off the top of my head, sorry. You normally need to buy electronic charts on top.

HOWEVER. Don't take a 'yot' to sea relying on one of these things. Someone on board should be able to navigate properly using a paper chart etc. Flat battery, fried electronics.. hard disk crash.. there's no road signs out there.

serious racers normally use a deckman or derivative thereof - a marinised tablet attached to some pretty serious analasis software that covers polars, tidal flows and a whole lot of extra stuff you really don't need unless you're a serious racer.

 

lol......for some reason i was imagining the caller had been afloat before

..Ignore basic seamanship/navigation at your peril...( dont rely on Mr Coastguard )

 

There's various ones:

Navman, Garmin, Raytheon/Raymarine, Nasa, Silva, Furuno, Hummingbird, Icom, Simrad etc etc....

There's hundreds. As far as the leccy charts go, they don't normally come with any, but they go for around 80-160 quid a go, depending on the area covered, the scale and all sorts of things. Look at the likes of C-Map as well for inspiration...

A decent navigator btw, goes for around £200+ - Colour ones are around 300 upwards, to a few grand, depending on who far you want to go.

As mark1234 said though, get the basic navigational skills as well though, as you can't rely on electronics to bail you out unfortunately

 

I was having a look at this when considering what holiday navigation system to use. Tele Atlas (the company that make maps for TomTom) tell me they only do land based maps. You shouldn't really need a GPS system unless you are doing some serious stuff. I suppose the TomTom could be useful for telling you your position now(in degrees as opposed to in a pretty picture,) so you could use a chart to work out where you want to go next?

 

You've obviously not seen what modern nautical GPS systems do then?

eg: http://www.garmin.com/products/gpsmap3010c/#

 

yeah, but you can't get a tom tom to do any of that

 

I use a Lowance chartplotter and sonar, and I use Navionics cartography with it. It works brilliantly.

I think you can get marine maps for Memory-Map which runs on a PDA, but the navigation functions really won't be as useful as on a dedicated plotter. Obviously you won't be able to drive an autopilot either.

If he wants to run it on a laptop, then there are more options. I've seen some software called SeaPro running, and it was quite impressive. You can link it into your radar, AIS, autopilot etc. You can also download the latest weather data onto it. It starts to get very clever then... By predicting the wind and tides it automatically shows you the course you should steer in order to end up at your next waypoint / destination.

 

SeaPro sailing version: http://www.euronav.co.uk/Products/Le...ormSailing.htm