Redundant, but useful

If you have an extra chartplotter, why not use it? Ms. Bettencourt has a perfectly good Garmin 546s plotter that has provided excellent service. It replaced a Garmin 192c  a few years ago only because the newer instrument offered a depth sounder function and a bunch of other desirable features.

The dashboard instrumentation was functional, but that big Humminbird fishfinder in the middle was old and sometime flakey.




It also bugged me a little that the 546s has a depth sounder feature that duplicated data from the fishfinder.

So I pulled the old fishfinder out yesterday and installed the Garmin 192c in its place.

This closeup (right) of the 546s shows that instrument's depth and subsurface structure display, with the boat parked at our dock.








And here, surprise, is the reason I think having two chartplotters in front of me is a good idea: It's not redundancy for backup safety.

It's because I can zoom one in for near and zoom the other out for far. One plotter can show me where I am in larger scale and the other can show me what's to come.

By the way, there's another layer of  GPS redundancy on the dashboard. The Standard Horizon VHF GX 1700 radio's channel selector display also shows course over ground, speed over ground and geographic coordinates.
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