PC plotter software in February PBO (rant)

[Robin]

Oh Dear! Out on limb here I fear - as a paid-up member of the Information Liberation Army.
Some other stalwarts of this cause will suffer more than me I fear. Hope I don't have to leave the forum in shame as an outed subversive.

Tend to agree. I have just downloaded all (yep every single one, all scales) the charts for the entire East Coast USA completely free of charge. Currently using them for planning purposes only but when used in anger next year updating them will simply mean downloading them all again free. I will also use these with Seaclear free software. Oh and all the USA pilots are available online as well free of charge.

 

[DavyMac]

Oh Dear! Out on limb here I fear - as a paid-up member of the Information Liberation Army.
Some other stalwarts of this cause will suffer more than me I fear. Hope I don't have to leave the forum in shame as an outed subversive.

Thread drift, but maybe I should have said that I remain to be convinced. I have mo problem with others having different views.

Personally, free Admiralty Charts to download would be great. But they do have a lot of commercial value as they are amongst the most widely used charts for commercial shipping. However, that's not the whole story and if free availability could drive economic growth as has been shown for other data (e.g. OS maps) then that must be taken into account. I do think the befit should be demonstrable for taxpayers as a whole and not just for yachtsmen wanting cheaper chartlplotters - even if I fall into the latter category.

Back on the thread, my demo copy of PassagePlus allows routes to span multiple charts. The route is shown on any relevant chart and you just select the next chart before placing your next route point.

 

[VicMallows]

PC chartplotter packages at LIBS. AIS and CPA/TCPA

Do get back to us on this if you get more info. Graham.

Sorry for the delay. Here are some details I gleaned at LIBS last Saturday:

EasyCharts (Meridean):
The guy on the stand (said he was a retired psychiatrist or something!) did not understand the question when I asked about CPA/TCPA. However he phoned 'the MD' who assured me that this was under development and would be available as a free update around Apr/May.
If they get it right, could be interesting at around £70 with the typical 800 UK raster Admiralty charts. Charts can be 'printed'. Need to see it in action first though!

Memory-Map:
Their stand in the Outdoor Show had the 2010 product at £30 which is the cheapest way of acquiring the 800 charts. They freely admitted there was a new version due out soon, and that they didn't know much about the marine product, and referred me to a stand in the BoatShow. The chap there understood my questions, and said the current US version supported CPA/TCPA according to their US website, but me hadn't yet played with it, so couldn't comment further. He confirmed that a UK 2011 edition was due out but would simply be chart updates. The CPA/TCPA update 'should' be available as a free download.

IMRAY:
Lady demonstrating their digital chart offering did not appear to understand question and suggested it was 'a shortcoming of my AIS engine' !! No indication of any plans to include CPA/TCPA or any way to follow up further. At least when I mooted the idea of copying their (purchased) charts into SeaClear she said 'I can't see why not'.

SeaPro (Lite):
This was an interesting surprise, being proprietary vector charts rather that the standard Admiralty raster set. The chap on the stand was very knowledgeable and instantly demonstrated the CPA/TCPA functions. Show price with full UK + CI charts was £78 (or £100 with a copy of REEDS thrown in. They have a good downloadable demo on their site. Still playing and not sure whether or not I like the vector charts compared to Admiralty raster (though the animated lights are impressive!).

Hope these comments are of interest.

Vic

 

[Mavis]

I wondered if anyone had tried Neptune Planner Plus which I have just downloaded a demo. Seems ok and has a great planning facility. Tiki Navionics Gold has a great user interface, much dearer but has no planning facility. I also looked at C-map but am I right in assuming that the C-map planner uses the same card as your plotter in which case you could not use the laptop and the plotter at the same time

 

[haydude]

At the beginning of my career I worked for a technical magazine (not Yachting). The editor hardly cares about the accuracy or completeness of the content.

What the editor cares about in order of importance is:
1) how the pages look (composition and illustrations)
2) space for the adverts
3) the content makes sense (if he can understand, than everyone else will)

The writer is the one responsible for the content and the quality depends on the time he has spent researching the subject. Judging by how much writers are paid, they will not have spent much time.

Kind of a vicious circle. In the end I am sure they will blame the reader who does not pay enough for the magazine.

 

[Plomong]

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?

It seems that you and I have been going down the same road at the same time, albeit in different countries and with slightly different requirements.

I have just finished an evaluation of 18 chart plotter software packages against the following requirements:

1. Charts must cover the UK and Ireland, western France, the Iberian peninsula and the western Med (northern coast only) as far as Corsica and Sardinia.

2. Must be intuitive to use, with a user-friendly interface, especially for panning and zooming, route creation and modification, etc.

3. Changing from one chart to another should be seamless and not require manual selection of the next chart, either when panning or when zooming in or out.

4. AIS, with graphical and numeric presentation of CPA and TCPA.

5. Tidal heights at ports and tidal diamonds, preferably with graphical presentation, but not essential.

6. Dynamic Tidal stream arrows.

7. Good route and waypoint management.

8. Ability to import and export routes and waypoints to / from a Garmin 76C hand-held GPS would be nice, but not essential.

9. Must run on Windows XP, and also Win 7 (for the future).

10. Bearing and distance between any two arbitrary points, one of which may be Own Vessel or a navigation aid.

11. On-screen presentation of GPS position, COG, SOG, etc in numeric form.

12. Logbook. Possibility to add manual entries would be useful but not essential.

13. Day/Night modes, sometimes called Screen Dimmer.

14. Print charts and lists of routes and waypoints.

15. Easy transfer of all info between the on-board EeePC and the home tower (HP 6000).

16. Be as inexpensive as possible, taking into account the package itself and the charts needed to cover UK + Irl, W France and N Spain (cost of W Med not an influence here).

The packages I have evaluated are: ("not demoed" means I did not try a demo, not that one does not exist -- it may, just I did not try it):
PC Plotter 5000 (demo) (www.pcplotter.com)
SeaPro 3000 Std (demo) (www.euronav.co.uk)
Belfield chartplotter (not demoed) (www.tideplotter.com)
TIKI Navigator (demo) (www.tiki-navigator.com)
TIKI Navionics Gold (demo) (www.tiki-navigator.com)
Imray Digital Charts (demo) (www.imray.com)
OpenCPN (demo) (www.openCPN.org)
Offshore Navigator (demo) (www.maptechnavigation.com)
Software On Board (demo) (www.digiboat.com)
SeaClear (not demoed) (www.sping.com)
Smarter Track PC Navigator (not demoed) (www.digitalyacht.co.uk)
MaxSea Easy (not demoed) (www.maxsea.com)
Navmaster Superyacht (not demoed) (www.pcmaritime.co.uk)
Neptune C-Map Planner Plotter (demo) (www.neptune-navigation.com)
Neptune Plotter Planner Plus (not demoed) (www.neptune-navigation.com)
Memory Map (not demoed) (www.memory-map.co.uk)
C-Map PC Planner (not demoed)
Navionics NavPlanner (not demoed)

Before reading the results, please take into account that these are the opinions of the evaluator, based on demos and information provided on the corresponding web sites or in documents provided through the web sites (user manuals, etc), and using as evaluation criteria his specific requirements. Thus, these results are subjective.
When a package does not meet my requirements, I give the reason, no more. This does not imply that it would not be ideal for your requirements -- try it yourself and see.

One general comment: I found the vector charts better than the raster charts. Especially the zooming and panning, seamless jumping from chart to chart, etc.

PC Plotter 5000
This, and SeaPro 3000 Std, are clearly my favourites. Excellent. One complaint: when own vessel is presented with the boat shape instead of the standard round circle, it could be more visible, maybe using the same symbol as used for AIS targets.

SeaPro 3000 Std
This is marred by the small size of the symbols used for most navigation aids (buoys, beacons, etc).

Belfield chartplotter
Does not yet calculate or present CPA/TCPA (rumoured coming soon).
Only covers UK and Irl. Coverage for W Europe, said to be under consideration.

TIKI Navigator
Waypoint and Route Management not to my liking.
User interface not very good, in my opinion. Would take some getting used to.

TIKI Navionics Gold
Waypoint and Route Management better, but
User interface not very good, in my opinion. Would take some getting used to.

Imray Digital Charts
No automatic detection of AIS targets within a specified range or time to closest approach.
CPA and TCPA not calculated.
AIS data only shown for the selected target.

OpenCPN
User interface is "different" and would take a bit of getting used to -- didn't like it.
No drill-down to larger scale charts,quilting is a messy way of going about moving from chart to chart.
No waypoint or route library (at least that I could see).
Maptech (MemoryMap) BSB charts for Europe (outside UK + Irl) would seem to be some years out of date.

Offshore Navigator
No AIS.
Maptech (MemoryMap) BSB charts for Europe (outside UK + Irl) would seem to be some years out of date.

Software On Board
Pan and Zoom not intuitive -- quite messy and prone to not do what you want. Maybe takes some getting used to???
Export/Import to GPS76C would be via CSV files with external conversions -- messy.
Most complete functionality, but user interface needs to be "windowized", a lot.

SeaClear
No longer being actively developed in a clear and directed manner by the person who originally developed it as a "hobby" activity.
Maptech (MemoryMap) BSB charts for Europe (outside UK + Irl) would seem to be some years out of date.

Smarter Track PC Navigator
This seemed to be the same as PC Plotter 5000!!!
Lite version is a simple graphical AIS radar-type display, without CPA/TCPA

MaxSea Easy
Poor product description on web, so not possible to evaluate this product properly.

Navmaster Superyacht
Navmaster Offshore does not include AIS. Superyacht version probably quite a bit more expensive.
Poor product description on web, so not possible to evaluate this product properly.

Neptune C-Map Planner Plotter
Looks and feels like a planner that has some plotting functions added.
User interface poor, in my opinion.

Neptune Plotter Planner Plus
UK + Ireland only, so not evaluated further.

Memory Map
Poor web description made it hard to "get to know" this product.
Product looks like it was derived from a land-based system.

C-Map PC Planner
Primarily a planning tool, with some plotting added later.
Poor web description made it hard to "get to know" this product.

Navionics NavPlanner
Seems to be just a planner, with no real-time functionality.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

And so -- I am between PC Plotter 5000 and SeaPro 3000 Std, with a slight leaning towards the former because the Navionics charts look better than the C-Map ones, at least those supplied with the demo.

Hope this is of use to you, Amulet.

If you would PM me your email address I will send you a document with all the information I gleaned from web sites, and another with forumites opinions and comments re the packages they know or use.

Plomong

 

[Amulet]

PC Plotter software - new useful information.

Plomong has added a much more thorough message to this post, read it if you care about PC navigation software. It's more useful than my immoderate ranting.

 

[angelsson]

I use TIKI Navigator gold, with a gold chart cartridge, very good and simple to use, does tides and AIS. Plus instruments, autopilot interface etc.
Very happy with it.

I also use it, realy very easy to use, designed by a boaty fed up with complex chart plotters.
In the test the PBO VERDICT (page 48) was clear, and fair to all, despite what has been said about its lack of direction etc. and TIKI came out of it extremely well for what was humble beginnings, and more strength to its elbow.

 

[smartcom]

Not all reviews lack meet - I did a review for Yachting Monthly's January edition on passage planning software which did take a critical look at the software available - no package could do a passage plan with tidal streams and then download the route to a GPS - and I got a lot of flack from some of the companies whose products I reviewed.

The big problem is that there are masses of PC based chart plotters etc out there, and at the price that all the entry level packages sell for, none of them can be making any money. Good software is time consuming (and so expensive) to develop - I'd say a minimum of 6 man months for a basic chart plotter if one uses an existing engine to do the chart drawing (which ties one in to a manufacturer's charts, so the manufacturer loses the ability to sell charts as a significant revenue stream).
The leisure marine PC navigation market is a small one, so to get decent products out there either the prices need to go up, or the number of players needs to go down, to give the develoopers a decent return.

For what you want, you're looking at one of the mid to upper range chart plotters - I'd recommend seaPro Standard myself.

Seapro Lite doesn't do tidal streams, and I forget if it has tide heights. The latest release has data export for TeamSurv, so you get an NMEA log file, and we have a free tool to convert NMEA to decoded .CSV, but it won't output data to your GPS.

Maptech charts for Europe are way out of date (unless this has changed recently), I wouldn't recommend anyone uses them.

The free CM93 charts are pirated copies from C-Map that must be 10 years old now, again not to be used for navigation quite apart from the moral and legal issuesof using stolen property.

The Imray software was developed by the same company as the now withdrawn UKHO/RYA package, and it really is pretty basic. With the level of discounting I've seen for it, I wouldn't bet on much more work being done on it.

By the way, the reason packages like Imray just do UK charts is because the UKHO have made it very simple and very cost effective (i.e. cheap) for companies to licence digital chart data from them, an attitude that hasn't yet spread to the rest of Europe.

Also, I was at a conference for location based services in December, and the betting is that the OS will follow the US approach of basically making its digital data available free of charge, as directed by the current government. Anyone fancy organising a campaign to put similar pressure on the UKHO?

Tim

 

[smartcom]

PS I also did a review of budget chart plotting software for YM about a year ago, which may be of interest to people.

 

[Ex-SolentBoy]

We use an Apple MAC on board .. Great for emails and films and downloading all the latest cd's to the on board ipod which lives in the on board hi fi system .. Apart from that I use a chart plotter and a Yeoman with charts . I like to spend my time sailing/motoring and not looking at a PC screen which is what I do most of the week .. am I in a minority again ..

If you are, then so am I!

 

[Amulet]

No data export from Meridian software

Further to my search for PC nav software.

I now have direct information that none of the Meridian software (inc. EasyCharts) can export data to a handheld GPS or to a file.

 

[DavyMac]

Further to my search for PC nav software.

I now have direct information that none of the Meridian software (inc. EasyCharts) can export data to a handheld GPS or to a file.

Are you sure that SeaTrak can't? I think it has a menu option to upload to an NMEA GPS.

I am not surprised that EasyChart can't though, as it is the Admiralty/RUYA plotter rebranded and that has not upload option either.

 

[Amulet]

Are you sure that SeaTrak can't? I think it has a menu option to upload to an NMEA GPS.

I am not surprised that EasyChart can't though, as it is the Admiralty/RUYA plotter rebranded and that has not upload option either.

from an email response from Meridian

an update is due for SeaTrak UK later in the year which will include support for these functions

Seems not, at present.