Cap'n Morgan wrote:
Dan, I believe kearney has a Raymarine chartplotter, and he is most likely using Sirius marine Weather. Here is a link to the Sirius site with supported chartplotters.
http://www.siriusxm.com/marineweatherI agree, it's nice to have. But my cell phone does a pretty good job of checking the weather, for much less cost, but not nearly the detail that one of these will provide.
Yes, I have the Raymarine setup with the Sirius weather subscription service. The weather data is displayed on it's own maps. I actually prefer this as opposed to it being overlaid on the charts. I found the garmin way of doing it harder to deal with. Raymarine offers some nice ways to split screens into multiple panes. I have two pages with weather/charts in different panes. One page with a vertical split and the other horizontal. This also makes it possible to use different zoom magnifications. Charts usually need to be close, but with weather you want to see what's 20 to 30 miles away and approaching. As I recall the Garmin did not offer an easy way to do this.
The Sirius setup gives you wind and storm speeds with arrows. So you can see how the winds are clocking across a larger area. This lets you make a better prediction about how the storms are likely to affect your area. Better than just looking at an animated blob of doppler radar.
Yes, you can get a lot of weather data on your phone these days. I still prefer having it on the plotter. When weather gets shitty the last thing you want to have to deal with is a handheld gizmo. But weather from the phone beats nothing, I suppose. I would also subscribe to the service if I could also get it on my Android phone. I'd still use the plotter for it while on the boat, but it'd be nice to have it on the go the rest of the time too.
For website weather I really like
http://www.wunderground.com