[TG] Depth contouring

[Tom - Raymarine - Moderator]

Hello Dave,

How easy do you want things to be, how much time and effort do you want to spend on the PC?

If you want things easy, an Axiom 7 DV with a low-cost transducer and a Navionics chart with active Navionics Plus subscription will give you SonarCharts Live, which draws contours onto the chart as you go. Just move the chart card or display between the yacht and tender and everything happens essentially automatically.

If you want to spend your cruising time doing data conversion and manual mapping or similar - and I can understand that, I spent last Sunday evening writing code for a maker project with my son - then anything that outputs NMEA0183 DBT or DPT and GLL messages should give you something to work with. If it can log that data to a card, all the better. We don't do anything small or low-cost anymore that can do that though (NMEA0183 is obsolete, and NMEA2000 is much harder for hobbyists to work with.)

Regards,
Tom