Electronic Charts

[Guest]

I am thinking about investing in some form of electronic charting system
It seems a bit of a mine field!!
So many people all telling you their system is best, so much bulls**t!!
Is it worth the expense?
What is the minimum system I will need?
Raster or Vector?
I would appreciate any advice
Thanks
Ian

 

[Robin2]

See threads on Laptop Software on 29/6/02

 

[charles_reed]

I've been using electronic charting for about the last 6 years having stumbled into it as an accident, when getting a chart-table instrument repeater. Most of my sailing is single-handed, in all weathers, and as I am prone to seasickness, the chartplotter has proven a boon.

The set-up I've got is fairly long in the tooth, being a re-badged Navionics dedicated plotter - but I've found the system very practical.
I've also got a lap-top system using the Max-Sea software, which is the same as is used by the majority of offshore racers.

Even with 250Mb of RAM and an 850Mhz CPU, running on NT5, the laptop system is far less practical than the dedicated chartplotter. Whilst the Max Sea will read any CD raster charts, I use the UKHO raster charts, which are far more pretty and detailed than the Navionics ones and tend to be more accurate but are about x5 the price for a comparable area and redraw slowly - there are occasional system glitches in heavy weather and if you are going down this road, for serious sailing, I'd go for a built in computer with an LCD screen, as do the professionals, rather than a laptop. It is essential to use a "proper" OS which rules out most of Microsoft's offerings - the Linux version of Max-Sea is apparently under development and would be my choice.

So - I prefer the vector Navionics charts, despite their obvious inferior quality to the UKHO raster charts, used with a dedicated chart plotter (even though the plotter is only the equivalent of a 386SX PC).
If you're cruising a small area I'd stick with paper charts - for me sailing the Western Approaches and Med the tonnage of paper and the enormous capital investment rules that out.
The Max-Sea software is great for passage-planning and the polars make decisions on windward tactics a piece of cake: if you have Inmarsat or Pactor II and can download the *.grb files the wefax simulations are super. The drawbacks of Microsoft OS make the laptop less than ideal for mission-critical systems.

I'd find it hard now to justify the cost of a new colour LCD chartplotter - the unit I have now came as a job lot - the whole instrument system and chartplotter came to half the current asking price of a top-of-range chartplotter unit and I fitted the Garmin 35 12-channel GPS receiver operating through the NMEA 083 myself. The primitiveness of the chartplotter software shows up occasionally - and one has to be aware of the entropy of the current GPS satellite system, which means the chartplotter accuracy will be progressively degrading and you're likely to have only about 6-7 years of prime use out of it.

 

[tome]

Have you looked at the Yeoman plotter? This uses conventinal charts and allows you to easily plot your positions (fed from a GPS receiver) as you go along. I've used one for the past 2 seasons and prefer this to any electronic display as it seems fail-safe. If you lose all power, you still have all your plots on the chart and can continue to EP from the last position.

I use the sports model and have wired this so that I can also use it in the cockpit which means I rarely have to visit the nav station when sailing short handed. Incidentally, the RNLI use these plotters which seems a good recommendation.

 

[Nigelhg]

I use the meridian chart plotting sofware which uses admiralty raster charts. A raster based system is a lot faster than a vector based one and the meridian software was the fastest and easiest that I found to work with ...i tried every demo disk that I could lay my hands one before purchasing maybe u should do the same and see which one u like yourself. One thing i will say is that i have had excellent service from the guys at meridian and this means a lot if you are trying to get something unfamiliar to work.

 

[Guest]

Thanks for that Charles
Ian