hydrographic office website - any use?

[Guest]

browsing through the ho websites (3) today. didnt find much of use to me personally. have I missed something? do you make any use of them?

for that matter, what do you think of the service / products we get from them?

 

[Guest]

No responses! Can only assume that no one uses the HO web site. Surely not.

 

[pandroid]

Not sure what you're looking for. Its a website flogging products. As such, its OK (but it'll be better if/when they put the full catalogue on line)

If you mean the searchable NMs site, then, yes, I do use it. I'd be sorry to see it taken away. I dont find the Easytide site much use as I buy the Bellfield product.

 

[Plum]

I use the weekly notices to mariners service and find this very useful indeed

 

[Shanty]

I find the searchable NM facility to be a vast improvement on the paper based weekly NM facility. Room for more improvement however:

When are they going to go live with the searchable NMs for pilots. I keep getting told "soon", or "in a few weeks"

If you do your corrections away from the computer (as I do), each individual NM needs to be printed out seperately - a great waste of paper

If the HO actually had any interest in encouraging leisure users to correct charts, they would make overlays more easily available - at present, you have to buy an entire week's worth, possibly to get only one or two relevent overlays. Fine for the professionals, but not realistic for leisure users.

Only visit the rest of the site(s) occasionally - not always easy to find what I'm looking for. A good kowledge of HO publications & their contents is just about vital.

Overall, about 5/10, useful, but could be a lot better.

 

[Bodach na mara]

Had a look last year when I was wanting extra charts (to replace my old 1966 versions) and found it pretty useless as well. I eventually went to the chartsales website found in the PBO small ads and bought a collection of outdated and second hand charts. The outdated ones were newer than my old ones!

Before anyone posts that I should only use in-date charts, I should point out that up here the rocks don't move and there are so few nav marks that I don't really use them. The old (pre 1970) charts are also better for landfall recognition as the etched drawings are works of art and very accurate dipictions of the coastline circa 1840, complete with the odd gaff lugger or frigate (Hornblower era.)

Ken Johnson

 

[yoda]

I recently tried to correct my charts using the HO web site. Given my prowess on the computer I tasked eldest son who seems more adept than most and it still took our combined powers about 2 hours to work out the way to extract data for leisure folio charts. Having extracted the relevent corrections and downloaded to my hard drive I checked each one in turn. Because you have to find the corrections for the source chart there is often corrections that are not applicable. Also the block corrections are to a scale for the source chart and not the leisure one they seem to be useless. All in all a bit disappointing for a series of chart which they seem to tout as the premier leisure product. They need to sort it out a bit more.

Yoda