My thought on PC use...
I would setup a stand alone PC with no other uses like e-mail or surfing the web.
I would put the nav PC at the nav station as thee main unit. I would hard wire a remote LCD monitor at the helm. I can use a wireless mouse at the helm to control the PC. The nav station is close to the helm and I would place the wireless transmitter close enough to make a good connection to the mouse.
My desire to do this is based on cost. I was expecting this to cost less to set up but also, I'm concerned that the manufacturers all have proprietary mapping setups and each time you want to update
charts they hit you for another $150. I cannot find much info on what this really is. But since I'm going to cruise the entire east coast plus great lakes, that could be a lot of SD or CF chart cards to buy regularly. Not something I want when I could download current
charts from NOAA (on a second computer then transfer to the nav computer that never goes online).
Now if I can download NOAA updates to an SD or CF card that can upload to the plotter then I'm fine with buying that system.
Anybody know if that is possible?