PC-Navigo for European river/canal cruising

rolf.nielsen

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I am going to cruise the European canals and rivers for 2-3 months next year. I don't yet know where my route will take me, but Northern France, Holland/Belgium and Germany will be the general area. Instead of buying tons of books, almanaks and maps for each area, I have looked into PC-Navigo which seems to be everything I need. It's a bit costly at eur 395 and seems old-fashioned since it's only available for PC and comes on a cd-rom (who uses these nowadays?) with a dongle. I may still go ahead and buy it but I'd like to check some things first:

1) Can I install it on several PCs? I need it on the boat's PC as well as my home laptop (for planning purposes).
2) Is the software sufficient to have onboard whereever I go, or will authorities in some countries require me to have hardcopy maps, charts or almanaks handy?
3) Can the software print a route plan or any other reference that I may keep in hardcopy during the voyage? This is both for flexibility (navigation from flybridge out of sight of PC) and security (backup in case PC fails).
4) Anything else I need to be aware of?

In case it's relevant: I'm a 36' motorboat with max speed ~9 knots and I have all qualifications and certificates needed (certificate of proficiency, CEVNI certificate, SRC).
 
European countries operating inland waterways provide free-to-use official ENC electronic charts covering your planned cruising area. Note these are official charts from the national hydrographic offices and the best you can get, produced by taxpayers money and offered free of charge. Here's a link from Dutch official website.

http://www.vaarweginformatie.nl/fdd/main/infra/enc

In addition to the charts you need software, and as pointed above OpenCPN is free open source software and probably a very good option.

edit: just looked at PC Navigo and that looks very interesting way of combining everything into one, probably a very good way to plan and track your route and very likely making life easier as they do the work on your behalf to get information which is spread around different websites on various languages.
 
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