Reccomendation for electronics inside at nav station

[Thistledown25]

Good morning! New owner here of a 40 foot monohull. I am updating the electronics on the boat with Raymarine. I’m curious what you all think is necessary inside at the nav station particularly since so many new systems have the ability to Bluetooth to an iPad.

Outside at the helm I will have axiom for nav, radar and depth and atlas for wind etc and autopilot.

What do you think is really needed or helpful down below? I see some boats have all three down below which seems unnecessary to me?

Thank you for any thoughts!

[Sailer_Med]

I thought through this a couple of years ago when I bought my boat and updated the electronics. Installed nothing below. The VHF is at the chart table but that is it.

The only thing that I might find useful is a compass to be able to notice our heading while I’m below and someone else is at the helm. I have a low propensity for studying the electronics from the salon and haven’t used the ability to connect to the Axiom from a iphone or ipad yet. Coastal cruiser, short hops (100nm or so at most) between anchorages/ports.

[Mal Reynolds]

The use cases matter here, and maybe resale. So many considerations and trade-offs it's impossible to make firm recommendations. Your question is very related to: "where do I mount the chartplotter?" It's actually a really hard question.

Are you single or doublehanding? If so, then I'd want visibility to AIS, radar, boat speed & heading, and wind speed and direction while below. And a way to control the AP.

Will you get caught in ugly weather and need to heave to? Radar, AIS, and VHF below will allow you to be below more safely in these crappy conditions.

Are you crossing oceans or making longer passages? then you will want to do weather analysis and route planning.

What will the next owner be doing with the boat? Will she want electronics below? Maybe this matters, maybe it doesn't.

What about the off-watch crew? Seems like they would want to know some numbers before coming on deck?

For example, I have a big boat that will be traversing the planet including much time in high latitudes. I also will be shorthanding much of the time. Watch-to-watch navigation will be in the cockpit with the chartplotter/PC under the dodger, and the autopilot driving 98% of the time. When below, I want visibility to basic numbers that tell me what the boat and wind are doing at any moment, and I also want visibility to AIS and radar below. I'll be putting display where I can see data from the bunk & galley (at Nav station). Your boat and use cases will no doubt be different.

Also, if you think you want VHF below, consider mounting the head unit in the cockpit and a CommandMIC below.

iPads are great, but have a weakness with corrosion at charge cable connections. For my use case depending solely on an iPad is too much risk (been there).

[ranger58sb]

All of our installed nav systems are at the helm.

We use TimeZero on a laptop (usually below) for planning, nav monitoring (when one of us happens to be in the house while underway), track capture, etc.

We can drive our main MFD from a tablet app, but haven't seen a reason to do that yet.

-Chris

[Thistledown25]

Sailer, Thank you! That’s kinda what I was thinking. It seems to me an IPad linked to my outdoor helm is really all that would be needed.

[Thistledown25]

Mal, Really thoughtful response! Very helpful. I am not ready for crossings as of yet and I don’t think my current boat a Jeanneau 40DS is the boat for them. Very much appreciate your thoughtful response. Definitely appreciate the use cases for the extras you point out when I “next level”. For now it’s just me and my spouse coastal cruising.

[SailingHarmonie]

Originally Posted by Thistledown25

Good morning! New owner here of a 40 foot monohull. I am updating the electronics on the boat with Raymarine. I’m curious what you all think is necessary inside at the nav station particularly since so many new systems have the ability to Bluetooth to an iPad.

Outside at the helm I will have axiom for nav, radar and depth and atlas for wind etc and autopilot.

What do you think is really needed or helpful down below? I see some boats have all three down below which seems unnecessary to me?

Thank you for any thoughts!

It depends on your boat and how you use it. All my serious navigation is done at my protected helm station on the large mfd, none at the chart table below. If I had a more exposed helm, that would likely be different. My boat spends 99.5% of its time on autopilot, so the watch keeper always has the freedom to move around. We always sail short handed, so an mfd available to the helmsman is important for good situational awareness.

No fixed instruments displays are below. If I am off watch and need to check current status, I use the ability of my iPad to mirror the main mfd. That gets us everything we need for long ocean passages.

A second mfd below seems an expensive addition without commensurate added value.

[s/v Jedi]

I have one single digital display in the salon, normally showing local time, UTC and barograph but screens for everything.

Also in the sleep cabin I have the same. The rest I use an iPad inside.

[tkeithlu]

A conceptual issue is glass cockpit versus separate devices. If you have very little space at the helm you may be forced in the glass cockpit direction, but consider: If you combine everything in one system, you have several nodes at which a failure can leave you with no information at all. The monitor burning out is an obvious example. In addition, initial cost and replacement cost may be very high. With a distributed system the failure on one component sends you to a redundant device - My back-up old Garmin GPS and my AIS both have nav capability if I lose OpenCPN.

So, what's your plan B? I lost all my electrical power by peculiar means once. Now I have an isolated battery mounted high in the boat that will power nav and radios, and I've added nav to my cell phone. I can even power the dashboard from the battery on my impact driver.

Do think it through and come up with the plan that suits you. You are planning for the worst case you can immagine getting into, not just when everything works.

[Hartleyg]

We have a small chartplotter (which is seldom used other than as a place for extra chart cards), VHF which is used in port/cruiser nets and an i70, which definitely gets used a lot for watching winds and depths. I also have a couple amateur radios plus two SSBs, but they are seldom used underway.
We have another i70 in the master stateroom for the same purpose.



The Nav station is mostly a place for my laptop (Also the charging station for all those little things that need USB chargers)


Hartley
S/V Atsa

[bergius]

It really depends how you prefer to navigate. We use primarily electronic navigation, and everything works on our iPads. This means navigation, route planning, weather, etc can be done from anywhere on the boat. Usually this means from a bunk or cockpit. Same with keeping the logbook. With electronic logs they can be accessed and amended using any personal mobile device.

So for us, the nav station is either an occasional work desk with a laptop, or more commonly, an extension of the galley work surfaces.


VHF is there, and has a screen showing some stuff like current coordinates. And we did install a custom screen driven by a Raspberry Pi that shows various boat stats from Signal K with Grafana. This is convenient as it is visible both in the galley and from the cockpit.

We don’t have (or intend to get) a traditional chartplotter. And even if we did, nav station would be a poor place for one in our usage.

[wholybee]

A laptop running OpenCPN below will show everything, wind and boat data, AIS, and Radar, and is cheaper than having any instruments below.

[Turtle Blues]

What wholybee describes is our second station setup. Use small 12v computer and display monitor. Does double duty as the entertainment center.

[sailingharry]

We have various radios at the Nav station, and the VHF has a remote at the helm.


We have a second MFD (Chartplotter) at the Nav station, came with the boat. In 10,000 miles, nearly all coastal, I've probably turned it on maybe 10 hours (maybe). It's certainly not worth the space it takes. With modern units that can link to a tablet below for armchair nav, it has even less value.



We have a single Ray multi-function display (as different from an MFD -- this is a 5" data display device), and it's the most useful item at the Nav Station. This is the old B/W digital thing, but it is programmable/selectable. Like Jedi and HartleyG, it's really useful. If I were doing a zero-base install, and could spare the budget, a basic square multi-display (Triton II, for instance) would be well worth it. About $500, gives you temps, speeds, winds, depths, etc at a glance. Modern ones can probably give you distance to the anchor as well.


Bergius, that's an awesome display! Is that a single screen, maybe 5" high and 15" wide? Where did you find such a thing?

[bergius]

Originally Posted by sailingharry

Bergius, that's an awesome display! Is that a single screen, maybe 5" high and 15" wide? Where did you find such a thing?

It's meant as a stats screen for gamers. You'll find a ton of them with "aida64" on Amazon.


The wood frame we built out of some old shelving we had ripped out of the boat.