Amulet
Well-Known Member
Given the number of posts about PC plotter software, and some issues I’m having with my setup (Offshore Navigator), I was excited to see PBO doing a comparison of PC plotter software in the February issue. Now for long! What a useless and uninformative article.
It opens with a lot of patronising twaddle about how sailors are too stupid to make their laptop do what they want, and then rambles off on some subjective impressions, with no useful tabulation of capabilities, and a set of screen shots which are of little help in distinguishing between products.
It is horrendously misleading about costs, with some programmes listed as having “charts included” and some not. “Charts included” might make you think you can compare the prices of these – think again. It can mean anything from the whole UK and Ireland coast for £40 (Memory Map), to a piddling little folio and an added cost of several hundred pounds if you want the whole UK (e.g., Neptune). Why not have a table of the cost of each system with the whole UK included?
We know that it is possible to get the whole UK for about £100 – Offshore Navigator or Belfield (neither included in the article); or even for £40 – Memory Map – if you are prepared to do without tides. I believe the RYA/UKHO (not included in the article) have now priced their charts out of this range.
I’ve been going round in circles trying to find a solution which does what I want at a sensible price, and hoped that this article was my salvation. Can anyone help me? My requirements are:
1. The whole UK and Ireland for less than, say, £200
2. Tidal heights and streams (including look-ahead for the entire year) for ALL tide stations and diamonds.
3. The ability to exchange routes, waypoints etc. with a simple handheld GPS (Garmin72 in my case). This is important because you can then continue to navigate after a crewmember has spilt beer on the computer.
4. The ability to extract data to a file on the computer – for me ideally as tab-delimited files – so that you can futz with routes etc in your program of choice – e.g. Excel.
5. The ability to process both an AIS data and GPS data.
6. The ability to run on Windows 7, 64 bit. (Quite a few haven’t got there yet.)
Offshore Navigator does everything but the AIS, but there is more than a little anxiety about tidal updates. When I bought it you got two years tides with the purchase. In principle there are updates, but last time I did updated, it was well into the season before they produced the UK data.
Don’t be fooled into thinking that the Belfield package does tides. You’d think it would, given that tides were the original business, but in fact it decides that some inshore tidal diamonds aren’t important enough to include. For me often the limiting factor on a passage is an inshore tidal gate omitted by them.
Chart Navigator Pro from Maptech (now discontinued) did everything I wanted, and I didn’t buy it because the tidal display was pants. (I now wish I’d stomached it, though I doubt that there is a version compatible with Windows 7, 64 bit.)
If we could liberate the UKHO chart data (the USA is more enlightened than the UK in this regard) then we could use the open-source SeaClear package, which does well in most reviews. However, the suggestion that you build a chart portfolio by scanning or by screenshots from (say) the £40 memory map offering seems pretty damned impractical.
It looks as if some of the very expensive packages do most of what I want, though I find it pretty hard to work out if they can do 3 and 4 above.
Memory Map and Maptech (where I started) come closest to doing what I want at a price I like. I will be a happy cheer-leader for them if they up their game just a notch and deliver all my wishes.
It opens with a lot of patronising twaddle about how sailors are too stupid to make their laptop do what they want, and then rambles off on some subjective impressions, with no useful tabulation of capabilities, and a set of screen shots which are of little help in distinguishing between products.
It is horrendously misleading about costs, with some programmes listed as having “charts included” and some not. “Charts included” might make you think you can compare the prices of these – think again. It can mean anything from the whole UK and Ireland coast for £40 (Memory Map), to a piddling little folio and an added cost of several hundred pounds if you want the whole UK (e.g., Neptune). Why not have a table of the cost of each system with the whole UK included?
We know that it is possible to get the whole UK for about £100 – Offshore Navigator or Belfield (neither included in the article); or even for £40 – Memory Map – if you are prepared to do without tides. I believe the RYA/UKHO (not included in the article) have now priced their charts out of this range.
I’ve been going round in circles trying to find a solution which does what I want at a sensible price, and hoped that this article was my salvation. Can anyone help me? My requirements are:
1. The whole UK and Ireland for less than, say, £200
2. Tidal heights and streams (including look-ahead for the entire year) for ALL tide stations and diamonds.
3. The ability to exchange routes, waypoints etc. with a simple handheld GPS (Garmin72 in my case). This is important because you can then continue to navigate after a crewmember has spilt beer on the computer.
4. The ability to extract data to a file on the computer – for me ideally as tab-delimited files – so that you can futz with routes etc in your program of choice – e.g. Excel.
5. The ability to process both an AIS data and GPS data.
6. The ability to run on Windows 7, 64 bit. (Quite a few haven’t got there yet.)
Offshore Navigator does everything but the AIS, but there is more than a little anxiety about tidal updates. When I bought it you got two years tides with the purchase. In principle there are updates, but last time I did updated, it was well into the season before they produced the UK data.
Don’t be fooled into thinking that the Belfield package does tides. You’d think it would, given that tides were the original business, but in fact it decides that some inshore tidal diamonds aren’t important enough to include. For me often the limiting factor on a passage is an inshore tidal gate omitted by them.
Chart Navigator Pro from Maptech (now discontinued) did everything I wanted, and I didn’t buy it because the tidal display was pants. (I now wish I’d stomached it, though I doubt that there is a version compatible with Windows 7, 64 bit.)
If we could liberate the UKHO chart data (the USA is more enlightened than the UK in this regard) then we could use the open-source SeaClear package, which does well in most reviews. However, the suggestion that you build a chart portfolio by scanning or by screenshots from (say) the £40 memory map offering seems pretty damned impractical.
It looks as if some of the very expensive packages do most of what I want, though I find it pretty hard to work out if they can do 3 and 4 above.
Memory Map and Maptech (where I started) come closest to doing what I want at a price I like. I will be a happy cheer-leader for them if they up their game just a notch and deliver all my wishes.
am I in a minority again .. 
