Orca Chartplotter - Thoughts?

[ColourfulOwl]

I'm interested in the Orca chartplotting system. I love the idea of having a proper marine grade tablet that can control and communicate with everything, whilst also being a standard android tablet allowing you to load your own navigation apps if you prefer.

Has anyone had any hands on experience with the Orca system?

I've been using the app on my phone and found the charts to be very easy to use, and they pretty much mirror the data found in Navionics and Savvy Navvy.

[Oldwheels]

I currently run Samsung Galaxy tablets. I pay about $400 per. I run Navionics software. Been doing this for 6 years now and never had a tablet die on board.
Thinking about a starlink system for remote areas though I currently use radio.

Their 10" tablet runs $1800 by the time you add what is needed. Chart map looks a bit thin for much of the globe. Depends greatly on where you are and needs. Looks to be interesting but no less expensive than a dedicated 10" screen from somebody with all the proven software.

[bergius]

There is another thread here with bunch of views from various sailors.

But in short, after a few years with Navionics, we switched to Orca last winter. Since then we’ve sailed some 3.5k nautical miles with it, quite a lot of it in the challenging rocky coasts of Finland and Sweden.

I find it vastly better than Navionics, for a set of reasons including:

• Routing is better. Navionics can only do "motorboat routing", Orca takes sailing into consideration and also things like mast height with bridges
• The charts are visually much clearer, especially depth contours and lights
• We can use the side of the tablet to show additonal sailing instruments (like wind and depth) from the NMEA2000 bus
• We can run Orca on more devices than we could Navionics. On our boat the number typically is 5: the "chartplotter tablet", plus personal phones and tablets (for quickly checking AIS CPAs or planning a route)
• AIS display is better, with the CPA visualized on the chart
• There is an actually pretty good night mode

There are also some other cool Orca features like autopilot control (including from an Apple Watch!) that we don’t use since we mostly steer with the windvane.

We did buy an Orca Core to integrate the Orca app with our N2K bus. However, we use the same waterproof Samsung tablet as the fixed display that we previously used with Navionics.

[CaptainRivet]

Originally Posted by Oldwheels

I currently run Samsung Galaxy tablets. I pay about $400 per. I run Navionics software. Been doing this for 6 years now and never had a tablet die on board.
Thinking about a starlink system for remote areas though I currently use radio.

Their 10" tablet runs $1800 by the time you add what is needed. Chart map looks a bit thin for much of the globe. Depends greatly on where you are and needs. Looks to be interesting but no less expensive than a dedicated 10" screen from somebody with all the proven software.

It depends heavily on the boat and the cockpit you are having, bennetau 385 is quite open cockpit un UK waters are quite rough, so you wanna have at least a watertight rugged cover for your tablet. My tip is Samsung s7FE, has 12.4“ screen and doesn‘t heat up too much like this others, it works in direct sunlight but is on the darker side. Have a cat with a protected cockpit, so don‘t care about that.
Further more it depends what sensors, radar your boat has if a orca core makes sense or not.

I have orca core 2, connected to Quantum 2 radar and my cats N2K plus S7FE with 12.4“ and iPad Pro 12.9“