Hello,
I recently purchased a
Garmin GPSMAP 7612 and consequently have been playing around with Bluechart Mobile to plan my course before heading out. I'm very familiar with
Navionics and can't help comparing the two products.
First and most critically it seems that Bluechart mobile does not provide bridge height for most bridges (at least on the eastern seaboard). I called
Garmin about this and they said the product DID report bridge heights but the tech was looking at bridges on the
west coast and couldn't show me the height for the
Chesapeake Bay Bridge or the
Brooklyn Bridge in NYC!
Navionics on the other hand does have this information and I'm amazed they would have left it out of Bluechart Mobile.
Navionics also now has the Auto-navigate function for free. You can do something similar on my Garmin chart plotter but I was VERY disappointed to find out that I had to
purchase the G2 Vision
charts to do this. The cost to be able to autonavigate with my garmin chart plotter for the eastern seaboard (Maine to Florida) was around $2K! While free on navionics!!!
Lastly, Navionics very clearly shows
current direction and tide level in a VERY intuitive way on the
charts. Bluechart Mobile sort of has this feature but the information that is automatically displayed does now show the tide level without going to another level (clicking on a tide reading point).
The GRIB
weather info and Active Caption capablities of Bluechart are wonderful by the way so it isn't all bad!!
Given all these considerations I believe it were possible I would love to use Navionitcs to create my course and then upload this course to the Garmin 7612 but so far I have not been able to figure out how to do this... Thoughts?? BTW I have searched this forum for ideas of how to do this but so far have been striking out.
Thank you in advance for your ideas/thoughts!
Peter