MYCBC – Why Join Us › Forums › Boat Maintenance and Mods › Transducer location for a Classic 26S and Recommended GPS Chart Plotter › Reply To: Transducer location for a Classic 26S and Recommended GPS Chart Plotter
Certainly you can get by with Navionics on an iPad, we did it for the first year that we owned the Catalina. The issues are that they are difficult to see the screen in the sun and they overheat in the sun. You also need a way in the cockpit to keep it charged. In addition to being built for the marine environment, a chart plotter connected to a VHF radio gives you the emergency DSC function. Personally, I wouldn’t be without my chart plotter but it depends where and how much you boat. The ocean is a different story than a lake.
Before we added the chart plotter, depth was by guess. We would go by what the chart said and once we got into shallow water we would use the line with the weight on it. I’ve heard that there are transducers out there that will work without a chart plotter, perhaps somehow send the information to a tablet but I’ve never researched it.
