Ground Tackle
Active Member
Do any of you use a tablet with the Navionics charts loaded onto it with the boating app as your chartplotter? If so, are you happy with it? From what I understand as long as I purchase a tablet with a gps receiver and a sd card slot I should be good. Any thoughts?
We currently have a Lowrance Elite 7 that we purchased just over 3 years ago and we have had nothing but problems with that unit. After a year it started freezing up and the screen would go blank on and off – the gps works sometime and other times it didn’t – completely unreliable and then it started marking fish swimming below the ocean floor!! The only thing that we think is correct is the depth reading. Lowrance was no help, we did all the upgrades they recommended and nothing worked - finally the Lowrance rep just said it is a software problem and sorry about that.
After doing some upgrades to the boat since we bought it a couple of years ago, the final thing we have left to do now is putting radar on and I am leary to go with one dedicated combined unit for everything, because if it glitches and goes down when you are out on the water - you loose everything. So, I am thinking we either purchase another new fishfinder/chartplotter combo and put a stand alone radar unit on, or my other thought is maybe we try the tablet with the chartplotter and I personally want to put our older previous Lowrance fishfinder (it is not a combo, just a fishfinder) which we still have buried in a closet somewhere – it worked excellent, has a large size screen and is just black and white and purchase a separate stand alone radar. I am getting the rolling of the eyes by my husband as he isn’t thrilled with the idea of the older fishfinder going on the boat. He thinks we should just purchase a new combo unit – I am just thinking if the older fishfinder still works as well as it did and the charts on a tablet??? Wonder if that would work ok.
What do you guys think? Advice appreciated. Thanks
We currently have a Lowrance Elite 7 that we purchased just over 3 years ago and we have had nothing but problems with that unit. After a year it started freezing up and the screen would go blank on and off – the gps works sometime and other times it didn’t – completely unreliable and then it started marking fish swimming below the ocean floor!! The only thing that we think is correct is the depth reading. Lowrance was no help, we did all the upgrades they recommended and nothing worked - finally the Lowrance rep just said it is a software problem and sorry about that.
After doing some upgrades to the boat since we bought it a couple of years ago, the final thing we have left to do now is putting radar on and I am leary to go with one dedicated combined unit for everything, because if it glitches and goes down when you are out on the water - you loose everything. So, I am thinking we either purchase another new fishfinder/chartplotter combo and put a stand alone radar unit on, or my other thought is maybe we try the tablet with the chartplotter and I personally want to put our older previous Lowrance fishfinder (it is not a combo, just a fishfinder) which we still have buried in a closet somewhere – it worked excellent, has a large size screen and is just black and white and purchase a separate stand alone radar. I am getting the rolling of the eyes by my husband as he isn’t thrilled with the idea of the older fishfinder going on the boat. He thinks we should just purchase a new combo unit – I am just thinking if the older fishfinder still works as well as it did and the charts on a tablet??? Wonder if that would work ok.
What do you guys think? Advice appreciated. Thanks