I'm working on upgrading my navigation on my Carver Mariner.

I boat mainly on Lake Ontario around the Rochester, NY area. There is not a lot of commercial traffic around here, well there is one Large ship that comes and goes out of here every month or so. I don't think that charter fishing boat broadcast AIS.

Currently on my boat, I have a small Garman 535 gps with no map detail downloaded for my area. It tells me my speed and where I've been - bread crumb lines. I also have depth gauge that tells only my depth. I have a GPS VHF radio (non AIS).

I brought this boat back from Ohio using my smart phone with Navionics app. Worked great but makes it hard to use my phone for other things. Not to mention it's on of the smaller screened smart phones.

My thoughts where to buy an older Ipad 4th Generation (with cellular has built in GPS). I was going to install a wifi sonar sender that will overlay depth and temp info onto my Navionics app running on the Ipad. (I was going with Wi-Fish or Sonar Phone).

My questions is do I need to add AIS to my system?

I plan on taking some trips across the lake to Canada and maybe down the lake to the Thousand Islands.