Any experience with toughbook laptops for chart plotter

[Namoian]

We have always has a Toughbook aboard (currently an FZ-40), but as a back-up to the Furuno chart plotters and for email and communications. It runs TimeZero which is the same nav software that Furuno uses so can plan routes on the Toughbook and then upload to the Furuno MFDs. Radar, etc displays on the Toughbook. Works for us and the Toughbook has a GPS so provides redundancy should the Furuno system go down.

[Franziska]

Originally Posted by moseriw

Have a look on the Oukitel Tablets. They are cheap and water resistant but the OS is OpenCPN

Hi, interesting.
Do you happen to know how many nits their displays have?
How is the daylight readability.
Can they be charged wireless?

[mako]

Originally Posted by Franziska

Hi, interesting.
Do you happen to know how many nits their displays have?
How is the daylight readability.

That's a good question that people forget to ask, especially me.

I bought an Onwa depth sounder for my fisherman. It was great at night but with only 400 nits was difficult to use during the day even though I had a hard top. Perhaps in an enclosed pilothouse (sail or power) it would be okay, but not with any glare or sunlight streaming in.

BTW, overall it was a good unit and returned strong signals. And out of all fairness, the bulk of their customers are commercial fishing boats, pretty much all of which have pilothouses.

[ColIn Ferguson]

I have an Oukitel waterproof tablet. Excellent daylight readability, I use it with Navionics mostly but it also controls my opencpn through a wireless VNC link running on a raspberry pi that does the AIS receiving, various temperature, pressure and position sensors and is linked to all the Seatalk 1 instrumentation.
I had a toughbook years ago

This setup is much better with much lower power consumption.

[Boatwright]

We have been navigating the northern US and Canadian Great Lakes for the last 10 years with a retired gov't surplus Toughbook. Still running Windows 7 Pro.

We have been using Memory Map software [URL="https://memory-map.com/software/windows-pc-app/]

The GPS Dongles available are amazingly accurate and widely available. The software includes AIS display, planning, active course information, anchor alarm, etc..

The feature we like the most is the raster chart file format. This gives us zoomable images of the actual NOAA or Canadian Hydrographic charts -- much better than the Garmin style plotter images. The cost for all (100+) digital charts, including detailed harbor charts for our cruising grounds was around $200. With the high cost and unavailability of traditional charts it's the only way to go.

Most of the time it is mounted the chart table. However for close quarter pilotage, we put it on the cockpit seat next to the helm. The Toughbook is tough; it is metal - the body is cast aluminum; while not waterproof it will take a bit of spray without shorting out; the Win7pro works fine -- we use it for email, wx planning, and even for watching Netflix when we have wifi available.