Orca and Raymarine Axiom integration, easy route sharing from tablet to chart plotter

Tablet navigation has come an extremely long way in the decade and a half since Ben Ellison started covering it. However, for as far as the apps have come, integrations between navigation apps and chart plotters remain remarkably frustrating. Some in brand solutions, like Active Captain with Garmin equipment and TZ iBoat with Furuno plotters, work quite well. However, cross platform options typically involve clunky, multi-step export and import routines. Often, these routines require ejecting and inserting physical memory cards, a task made more complex as memory card slots move to the back of slick, all glass chart plotters. Raymarine and Orca have broken with recent trends and offer a wireless integration that allows for remarkably simple sharing of routes between a tablet running Orca and a Raymarine Axiom chartplotter.

Orca offers boaters the ability to navigate using a flexible combination of their app, tablet, and sensor core. Their app can run on your own tablet or theirs and allows users to either leverage the internal GNSS receiver in the tablet or connect to Orca’s Core 2. With the Core 2, Orca is also compatible with Raymarine and Navico radars and Garmin, Navico, and Raymarine autopilots.

I spent a recent afternoon with an Axiom and both Orca’s own tablet (the Orca Display 2) and an iPad. The integration proved easy to establish and then quick and reliable to use. Once connected, sending a route is as simple as finding the route in Orca’s list of saved routes and selecting send to Axiom. Currently, Raymarine’s LightHouse Charts don’t support automatic routing. So, this integration offers a way for boaters to send (hopefully carefully reviewed) automatic routes to their Axioms.

I tested establishing the integration between Orca and Axiom on both. On the iPad, creating the link was super easy because the app was able to use the QR code displayed by the Axiom to facilitate the connection. Unfortunately, the Orca tablet doesn’t have a camera built in, so you must manually type the Axiom’s SSID and passprhase. While certainly not the end of the world, the time saved by quickly just scanning the QR code is nice. I can’t imagine Orca envisioned this use case when they decided not to include a camera in the Display 2.

As I noted in the video, the integration limits route sharing to a single Orca route on the Axiom. Raymarine tags the route as an Orca Route and seems to handle storage a little bit differently. Each waypoint’s name indicates its Orca sourcing. Orca’s routes tend to have a lot of waypoints and I think that part of the reason for only storing one Orca route at a time might be to avoid proliferating thousands of waypoints from the automatically calculated routes. As you can see in the screenshot above, waypoints seem to be anywhere between about 50 and 800 feet apart. So, storage of more than one route could quickly make for a mess.

Logbook improvements

With an Orca Core installed on the boat, logging trips and collecting stats about them should be relatively straightforward. Early on in Orca’s development, the logging functionality proved less than reliable. I found I wasn’t alone often watching the synchronization progress bar never make progress. Fortunately, logging functionality has been revamped and reimplemented as Logbook.

I just returned from a week on a sailing cat in Croatia’s Dalmatian coast and I’m pleased to report that Orca tracked the entire trip flawlessly. Even better, those tracks were quickly synced with Orca’s cloud servers and the logs are now available in the app. On arrival, I connected the Core to the boat’s NMEA 2000 network and to the Starlink Mini I brought along. Throughout the trip, logbook entries were created for each day and synced seamlessly.

Logbook entries support GPX export for use in other navigation apps and uploading to a chart plotter. Additionally, clicking on the data boxes in the Trip summary brings up timeline plots of the indvidual data including speed over ground, speed through water, wind, and fuel consumption.

Final thoughts

The integration between Orca and Raymarine is an exciting step forward. Easing route sharing between tablet apps and installed equipment addresses a pain point I hear about regularly from boaters frustrated by either plotting routes multiple times or following length export and import routines. I am hopeful that the integration won’t end at Raymarine and Orca. I would love to see other apps developers and installed electronic equipment manufacturers embrace interoperability. However, I’m aware that, especially on the installed equipment side, that might not be terribly likely. In recent years Raymarine has embraced interoperability more than any other manufacturer. So, for now I’ll hope their collaborative approach is rewarded and other companies are compelled to follow their lead.