all of these things can be done on a garmin 101 so i'm guessing that the navi ($120+) will also do the same.

the advantages with a full sytem for a boat ($600 and up) is that you can get depth soundings, and the ability to overlay charts. also the screen is bigger and can be in colour.

Whitworths have display cases full of gps stuff.

after using the cheaper gps system on a 40' cruiser i'd say unless you spend big the gps stuff designed for this purpose is really not much better than the portable units we all use for speed sailing.

The track plotting part sounds like the important bit, if you want decent resolution of tracks whilst underway including zoom functions then none of the handhelds are suitable. Contact Johnny Appleseed or Whitworths, they will sort you out. Any downloadable unit can then be transferred to course photo.

Game boats for one update their systems regularly, so might be worth a try in those circles for second hand.

yagon said...

<<<<<

Re the plotting on an aerial photo - I meant after the sailing session, not real time.

>>>>>>

Yep, that's easy, as already said, you can open a .gpx or .kml file in googleearth. If whatever unit you decide on doesn't make these files it self, "gpsbabel" (a free program) will do it for you. There is other commercial software for analysing data that will also save your data as .gpx files

There are several examples of this in "photos - windsurfing"

realspeed will do it, and I think gpsarPro will also.

In RealSpeed, use "File->Export".

To use the sbn files in GPSAR, you need to use the "GPSARpro" version.

OK, thanks everyone. Got it working now. Problem appears to have been "C:DevRSpeedReleaseData\" automatically appearing in front of the file name when trying to export the file. Once I deleted this the file saved as a .gpx file fine. Whereas before, with that addition to the file name, it was saying "pathway does not exist".

Cheers
Dave