[TG] Depth contouring

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I live aboard a yacht and am currently cruising Malaysia. I enjoy exploring rivers, reefs and other shallow areas but taking the yacht into uncharted or poorly charted areas is dicey, especially rivers where visibility is usually poor. I am looking for a device that will help me chart depths from the dinghy. Right now I use an old-fashioned lead with knots on a bit of string to measure depths from the dinghy. Features I'm looking for include:

Portable
Self-contained
Battery operated
Depth below transducer
Position (GPS)
Ability to store depth and position data
Easy transfer of depth and position data to a pc later.

Can you suggest some products I can look at?

Dave.

[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 We don't do anything small or low-cost anymore that can do that though (NMEA0183 is obsolete, and NMEA2000 is much harder for hobbyists to work with.)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