DeeGee
Well-Known Member
Don\'t throw away your paper charts...
Ne jetez pas vos cartes papier! Voiles et Voiliers has an in-depth (5 pages) look at vector charting packages, in the light of French skippers (non-commercial) no longer needing paper charts, as long as they have electronic equivalents aboard. (Surprising in the light of their stringent safety regs - which are more or less the same as charter coding your yacht – for offshore use).
They looked at CMap, Navionics, Garmin. They were not looking at software, like MaxSea, Seapro… which use the data produced by the vector packages.
They took a look at the screen data produced by each of the products, at different scales, for the 'Rade de Toulon' and 'Abords de la Rochelle'. The article illustrates with screenshots of the various outputs, at different scales, and a print of the relevant paper chart. The screenshots show navy mooring buoys missing, lights out of place or missing.. devastating, really. Buoys which were in place were sometimes misleadingly shown as towers, instead of normal buoys. Whole breakwaters in La Rochelle were missing on CMap and Navionics.
[Note, I have no axe to grind – I am using CMap, and, yes, I have noticed a few errors on lights, but I always use a paper chart as primary data, NOT CMap].
Their summary, or my rather good translation of it…
“A Dismaying Assessment
By the screen captures, one can only be frightened by the errors and omissions. The Italian fabricators of the vector charts defend themselves by saying their products should only be used with those dictated by the regulations.
For ever, in France, the marine paper charts were obligatory aboard pleasure craft, which were provided by SHOM, UKHO or all other official chart organisations. From now on this new situation, which frees the skipper from all apprenticeship of the art of navigation (the advent of GPS was a major stage), can choose at leisure amongst the positioning systems (vector or raster charts)….
The three cartographies which we have tested and which can be read on the dedicated plotters, show themselves finally to be bad fellow-travellers… Unahappily, regulation imposes no constraints of accuracy on these cartographies and lets SHOM battle in order to enforce its fundamental rights. In brief, if you have to choose between one of these three systems, Garmin has our favour, because it is the only one to reference itself openly to the official charts, whilst CMap, and worse still, Navionics, literally make fun of the skipper in proposing products full of gross errors or missing some most elementary information. And we haven’t even talked ot the price!”
A sidebar in the article I lazily just stuck through Babel Fish:
With ARCS (charts of British Admiralty), the SHOM is one of the hydrographic services more reputes in the world. Since 1984, debuts of Navionics and C-Map, the charts of the SHOM are used by them as reference and on the same basis the English charts or etran-geres. But two Italian manufacturers extremely the deaf person ear since years when the SHOM them reclame of the royalties for use of the intellectual property. Today, C-Map and Navionics have sign no agreement, and only Garmin pays relative royalties has the use of the French cartographic. It is one of the reasons why the electronic cartographic Garmin avere nearest to the official paper charts of SHOM.
Ne jetez pas vos cartes papier! Voiles et Voiliers has an in-depth (5 pages) look at vector charting packages, in the light of French skippers (non-commercial) no longer needing paper charts, as long as they have electronic equivalents aboard. (Surprising in the light of their stringent safety regs - which are more or less the same as charter coding your yacht – for offshore use).
They looked at CMap, Navionics, Garmin. They were not looking at software, like MaxSea, Seapro… which use the data produced by the vector packages.
They took a look at the screen data produced by each of the products, at different scales, for the 'Rade de Toulon' and 'Abords de la Rochelle'. The article illustrates with screenshots of the various outputs, at different scales, and a print of the relevant paper chart. The screenshots show navy mooring buoys missing, lights out of place or missing.. devastating, really. Buoys which were in place were sometimes misleadingly shown as towers, instead of normal buoys. Whole breakwaters in La Rochelle were missing on CMap and Navionics.
[Note, I have no axe to grind – I am using CMap, and, yes, I have noticed a few errors on lights, but I always use a paper chart as primary data, NOT CMap].
Their summary, or my rather good translation of it…
“A Dismaying Assessment
By the screen captures, one can only be frightened by the errors and omissions. The Italian fabricators of the vector charts defend themselves by saying their products should only be used with those dictated by the regulations.
For ever, in France, the marine paper charts were obligatory aboard pleasure craft, which were provided by SHOM, UKHO or all other official chart organisations. From now on this new situation, which frees the skipper from all apprenticeship of the art of navigation (the advent of GPS was a major stage), can choose at leisure amongst the positioning systems (vector or raster charts)….
The three cartographies which we have tested and which can be read on the dedicated plotters, show themselves finally to be bad fellow-travellers… Unahappily, regulation imposes no constraints of accuracy on these cartographies and lets SHOM battle in order to enforce its fundamental rights. In brief, if you have to choose between one of these three systems, Garmin has our favour, because it is the only one to reference itself openly to the official charts, whilst CMap, and worse still, Navionics, literally make fun of the skipper in proposing products full of gross errors or missing some most elementary information. And we haven’t even talked ot the price!”
A sidebar in the article I lazily just stuck through Babel Fish:
With ARCS (charts of British Admiralty), the SHOM is one of the hydrographic services more reputes in the world. Since 1984, debuts of Navionics and C-Map, the charts of the SHOM are used by them as reference and on the same basis the English charts or etran-geres. But two Italian manufacturers extremely the deaf person ear since years when the SHOM them reclame of the royalties for use of the intellectual property. Today, C-Map and Navionics have sign no agreement, and only Garmin pays relative royalties has the use of the French cartographic. It is one of the reasons why the electronic cartographic Garmin avere nearest to the official paper charts of SHOM.
