Electronics Refit

[pmyatt]

Refitting for lengthy cruising/liveaboard Med and possibly Caribbean/USA. Old ST50 instruments displays are failing and have decided to remove Raymarine RL9 radar and old Autohelm Navcentre. Considering ST60 instruments, combined colour radar and chartplotter and Raymarine autopilot. Plan to retain paper charts but with reduced portfolio (currently about 250 charts just for Med). Have used PC Wayplanner and Livecharts in the past on a laptop but am not familiar with modern electronic charting products. My initial thoughts are that vector charts are more user-friendly than Raster charts - but I have been known to talk rubbish. Anyone any thoughts or experience of Navionics v. C-Map v. UKHO Raster charts and PC v. chartplotter. Plan to do my purchases at SBS in Sep.

 

[DeeGee]

CMap

Gee Wiz. A sailing question on THIS forum, are you sure this isnt a joke? Well, taking at face value...

I have CMap NT/PC running on a slow old Toashiba laptop. The laptop is slow because it is relatively low powered and is plugged into my ships supply via a cigarlighter socket. I prefer paper charts, and use small-scale for passage making, then rely on the laptop when closer in. This way I can have enough paper charts for passage, but not the hundreds of large-scale which I have on the PC. I should add that I also have another laptop stashed away, which I can self-power for a total of about 1 hour. Not arguing to anyone that I have a totally secure system, but who has?

The CMap charts are very good. You need a navigation package to go with them, I use MaxSea, but I believe that there is some choice there, I just took pot-luck. MaxSea is pretty reasonable, and it comes with a free weather predictor where you send an email and a GRIB file (v small) comes back and is unpacked to show oodles of info, and seems fairly good at prediction (I think they all use a version of the same modelling software...).

You will still need some large-scale maps if you go up estuaries. CMap only goes so far. I have no idea if any others go further. Our CMap will go further up an estuary than the chipped versions on dedicated plotters.

Some people have found a way around the protection on CMap for the PC, but unfortunately, that does not include me, I use dongles, so I can run it on my or anybody else's computer.

Hope this is of interest.

 

[Oldhand]

Re: CMap

I would also recommend MaxSea which runs fine on a relatively low powered (800MHz) PC. C-Map charts have their limitations and I don't find them any more user friendly than raster on a 15" LCD monitor. However, I am sure vector is better than raster on typically smaller plotter displays. The joy of MaxSea is that you can use both vector (C-Map) and raster (ARCS, Maptech, Mapmedia) charts with the application, so one can always have the best charts for the purpose you require. Mapmedia. although expensive, tend to give better coastal detail in France than most other electronic cartography and can only be used on MaxSea. If you like UK Admiralty paper charts, then Maptech and ARCS are direct copies.

If you are just going for a dedicated plotter, for the English Channel area at least I found that C-Map NT has some glaring ommissions which I didn't find on Navionics Gold equivaents.