Wednesday, January 8, 2014

Marine Navigation - Little to Big Screen

I love my antique Garmin GPSMap 478. It has both autoroute roads and NOAA charts on it. The NOAA part can be supplemented by adding other maps, like Inland Lakes or Fishing Hotspots, to now include all inland waters as well the the NOAA charts. The supplemental marine charts are old, but they're cheap and are plenty good enough for me...I got mine on eBay for $20 each. There are rumors that they can be downloaded for free. If you want current auto or marine charts they're available, but too pricey for me. Anyway, now I have everything on one handheld device with it's own battery and it fits in my shirt pocket.



My wife complained that she never knew where we were while on the boat. I got her an EVO 4G LTE (free compliments of a Sprint upgrade) and downloaded Navionics so she could see real-time info on her phone like position, speed, depth etc.

She suggested that it was still hard to understand what was going on because the screen was so small.

Here's what I did:
I got the largest HDMI flat screen I could find that wouldn't be too big for the boat...Walmart ~$100. I then bought a EVO 4G LTE Wireless Media Link for $60 on eBay.




And a cheap inverter from Walmart so I didn't have to rely on my generator to get 120VAC for the TV and adapter power.
Schumacher XI14 Power Inverter
This one even has a USB port which you will need for the adapter.  

Now we bring up the Navionics program on the phone and do a 3 finger swipe 

and wallah! the phone display appears on the TV.



Problem solved.
 

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