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Went scalloping this past weekend in Crystal River Fl. with friends. First time to try out our Ipad air 2 with the Seaiq navigation program. Seaiq uses NOAA charts which are free and you can use active captain at the same time. We really liked the large size of the ipad for navigation and as a plus you can take pictures as you travel.


The maps were of course very accurate. We went out about 2 miles and south down the coast about 8 miles to were we found the most scallops. At low tide it was only about 6 foot deep. The northern gulf along the Florida west coast gets deeper at a very slow rate. Had no problem viewing the ipad in the boat.( was at home we were in another boat) The Ipad air2 and some of the other ipads have a gps chip on them, they do not have to be within range of cell towers. Do not bother asking phone people about this chip as they will tell you the location part will only work within range of cell towers. They know about phones but not GPS chips in ipads. We were way outside cell tower range and the seaiq worked fine. We just followed our track back to the start of the channel. We also have a Lifeproof case on the ipad so it is waterproof. Also you can put a lot of charts on the ipad. We have charts from Mobile Alabama, all of west and east coast of Florida to Jacksonville Fl. and it only used about 3gb.

The iPad GPS situation is really simple to understand. True GPS is only on the chip that carries the cellphone circuit; therefor any iPad that has cellphone capability has GPS, any WiFi-only iPad only has cell tower location service (The cellphone service does NOT have to be activated for the GPS to work).

Jim Bunnell wrote:The iPad GPS situation is really simple to understand. True GPS is only on the chip that carries the cellphone circuit; therefor any iPad that has cellphone capability has GPS, any WiFi-only iPad only has cell tower location service (The cellphone service does NOT have to be activated for the GPS to work).

Close. The WiFi-only iPads use WLS, which is a service provided by Apple and others that geolocates the Mac addresses of all of the WiFi base-stations in the world (by sending their Mac addresses and geocoordinates from everybody's cell phones all the time) so that the iPad can lookup its location based on any WiFi base station that it can "hear". It's a clever hack, but doesn't involve cell phone towers.

In any case, only the cellular enabled iPads and all modern iPhones have true GPS that works offshore.