New to seabreeze so hello to all. I have done the passage from Sydney to Brisbane and points in between a few times and will be heading north from Sydney again this year. Does anyone have any experience with how well the iphone/ipad Navionics ap works on coastal passages. I use it in the harbour and find it useful. I haven't tried it out on passages. Is there any issue with needing to be near base stations and whether the coverage of same is sufficient for the thing to work on a coastal passage up the east coast? Anyone have experience to share?
IPad Navionics works using the internal GPS, so is not reliant on the mobile network.
I used mine for a trip from Sydney to Lake Macquarie up to 6 nm offshore and I was perfectly fine.
Michael
I played with mine while on a big ship cruise last year well offshore and it worked fine. It may not have the accuracy of a dedicated gps chart plotter but you shouldn't be that close to the hard stuff anyway. Watch the scale, smaller rocks, islands don't appear except on very small scales.
We have an ipad on board and found it really handy,both for navigation (we use it as a extra only),weather updates when in range of a tower,the low power consumption is a added bonus,we leave ours on standby all the time when on board,instant emails ect.
I've used iphone navionics up to 10nm offhore (WA & Qld) - Just for refernce, it works fine. Iphones - Even in cases - are not particualrly waterproof or robust, so if you do venture far from the coast, i would recomend you use a purpose built marine gps / plotter, and keep the iphione / ipad just for reference. They are fantastic when you are on land for dreaming / plotting your next ocean voyage 
Poods
Thanks Poodle. I have a plotter and, of course, paper charts at the Nav station down below. I was intending to use the Navionics at the helm for interest and see whether it was worth the expense of a bus and an extra dedicated plotter in the cockpit.
I did a delivery trip to Adelaide from Port Fairy recently and the diesel self destructed at about the half way point. We missed our weather window and sailed into an unfamiliar harbour in fifty knots with no motor, and no electronics bar the i phone and the gps ap.Fortunately, it gave us the layout of the marina, as we were doing 10 knots under bare poles entering the marina at 5am . At the least, the i phone was a great backup. By the way we did get in without wiping out either the marina or ourselves. Very nice bottle of rum for breakfast after we pulled that one off.
