Sat Nav for Laptop in a boat

davilown

Does anyone know if this combination is possible? My old man whats a system and is has about £1000 - £1300 to play with.

Anyone else had experience?

cheers

:beer: monster

rogerramjet

If you check for wired GPS units on ebay you will see that nearly all can be connected via USB, therefore there is no reason why a laptop cannot be used as a GPS system (I actually know of peeps who had done this in cars ) the only difficulty maybe finding the software relevant for using in a boat.

check a site like pocket gps world http://www.pocketgps.co.uk/ where info maybe more available on your needs

tigermatt

rojerramjet wrote:

the only difficulty maybe finding the software relevant for using in a boat

Not sure, but does this help? http://www.google.com/search?q=boat+gps+software

John_Gray

Other than the "why don't you search on Google?" method previously mentioned, Garmin are well-known for all sorts of marine navigation hardware, and you might have a gander at their website...

John

Relick

Another site worth looking at is Maptech.com they do software for dedicated units on SD cards and also pc software. I used a laptop for a while in my boat with their software and a simple £50 gps usb unit (also used this setup in car as well with autoroute). It worked fine but in the end went and got a dedicated unit installed which I can just unplug and take off the boat with me as a laptop is not inclined to be salt water friendly!
There are a lot of options available depending on your situation, handheld units are popular and you just plug in the sd card containing your charts for area of cruising. The better ones are waterproof and a lot can also be used in car with another sd card.
Yahoo group gps-navigator
http://groups.yahoo.com/groups/gps-navigator has been very helpfull in deciding on merits of different software.