Preparation - Pacific Crossing Notes: A Sailor's Guide to the Coconut Milk Run - page 26

Electronics
Our budget allowed for a radar that we rarely used - but when we did, we were glad we
had it. We also carried an AIS receiver which was useful off the coast of North America
and Australia, though rarely in between. The Pacific is full of small fishing boats of dubi-
ous accountability, and only a fraction transmit an AIS signal.
Our GPS, radar and AIS units were standalone devices with their own displays. While we
relied entirely on paper charts for our Mediterranean/Atlantic/Caribbean cruise, in the Pa-
cific, we gradually shifted toward electronic charts. We used an old laptop running
OpenCPN (a popular open source charting software) and interfaced to our GPS' NMEA
output as a chart plotter. Still, it wasn't until Fiji that we started using electronic charts for
coastal navigation, and even then, we always carried paper charts as a backup.
In Panama, we came across a wonderful (and free) computer operating system called Nav-
igatrix, created and maintained by sailors for sailors. Navigatrix includes a comprehensive
compilation of electronic tools for navigation, communication, information and security,
ideally suited for use on a boat (including OpenCPN Chartplotter, zyGrib GRIB file viewer,
Airmail for HAM and Sailmail, GPS interfacing, MS Office compatible word processor
and spreadsheet, and more). It is extremely robust and can be installed on the hard drive
alongside your current operating system or run from a 4 gigabyte USB stick (hence it
works even if your hard drive doesn't). Navigatrix comes fully preconfigured and can be
downloaded for free at navigatrix.net [#1] .
With Navigatrix we could remove the hard disk from our navigation laptop and run the en-
tire operating system plus software from an SD card. This reduced the laptop's current
draw to about 1 Ampere - a lot less than a typical marine chart plotter. This is something to
keep in mind when considering electronics and computers for a Pacific crossing. You
should also remember that you'll be without Internet connectivity for long stretches, which
means you can't always keep up with automatic downloads for software patches and secur-
ity updates. This was another advantage of Navigatrix: it works out of the box without the
need for constant updates.