PC plotter software in February PBO (rant)

The PBO editors must be a sleep on the job to allow such a weak review (which is surprising for PBO). It gave none of the comparisons tables you normally see, scores out of 10, comparison of features/price, information on tech support availability (do you get free phone support from Oz?) etc.

At least I was amused to find that the article is encouraging (and doing) illegal copying of copyrighted items i.e. charts !

So guess they will be happy if I scan PBO in each month and publish it on the website PBOforFree.com - that way no-one needs to buy PBO ever again (save for one copy!) ! Yippee...... :)

Come on PBO editors wake up, and do some checking on what your contributors are writing, it's what you are paid for!
 
DonDay said:
At least I was amused to find that the article is encouraging (and doing) illegal copying of copyrighted items i.e. charts !
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I was led to believe it is OK if you have paid for the chart to make and use an electronic copy of it. I think it is not legal to give it to someone else. I have also read that if you buy, say the Memory Map £40 electronic charts there is no legal barrier to manipulating them for use with another piece of software. My impression was that creating copies for someone other than the license holder was illegal.

However, I'm a legal numpty, and may have misunderstood.
 
One more vote for Imray charts and tides. I find them good. They work well on pc with gps dongle. They are UP TO DATE. I have had some nasty scares with cheap out of date charts in the past.

AIS not perfect yet. Hope they are working on it.

I tried a bunch of other offerings, least bad was Opencpn, but soon dumped that. Also, I had to get charts extra, which were not up to date.

Mike
 
Amulet said:
I have also read that if you buy, say the Memory Map £40 electronic charts there is no legal barrier to manipulating them for use with another piece of software
QUOTE]

Guess it depends on the licence. But can't imagine Maptech being happy about it. Maptech charts are copy protected (at least on my system), so implies you can't. But worse - the journalist has effectively tried to subvert the copy protection (an illegal activity in its own right) and then tries to re-calibrate them - from a safety aspect absolute stupidity!

What any sensible reviewer would have said for the few extra pounds buy a system with professionally created charts and don't try and do it yourself!
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Last edited:
Stop Press: Meridian EasyCharts

Back from the Boat Show. Meridian showed their "EasyChart" software/UK charts. The whole UK for £70. I think it has all the functionality I yearned for in my original post.
(A couple of small queries to resolve).
 
Amulet said:
I was led to believe it is OK if you have paid for the chart to make and use an electronic copy of it. I think it is not legal to give it to someone else. I have also read that if you buy, say the Memory Map £40 electronic charts there is no legal barrier to manipulating them for use with another piece of software. My impression was that creating copies for someone other than the license holder was illegal.

However, I'm a legal numpty, and may have misunderstood.
Click to expand...


It depends on the licence, but I would doubt you can copy them. Plus, the act of roving any rights management is illegal.

Remember the UK's laws are horrendously out of date on copyright. Most people have broken them at some point doing something obvious like taking music off a CD and onto an MP3 player.
 
I'm a bit cofuffled about the PC map software options.

In a nutshell, what ones are really worth having? I see Memory Map do the £40 ones and I saw another on for about £70 but forget it's name b.... or d...... if I remember right.

So what's the reality folks?
 
Fire99 said:
I'm a bit cofuffled about the PC map software options.

In a nutshell, what ones are really worth having? I see Memory Map do the £40 ones and I saw another on for about £70 but forget it's name b.... or d...... if I remember right.

So what's the reality folks?
Click to expand...

Sadly there's not a simple answer. The memory map at £40 is a great buy if you are prepared to do without tidal data and AIS input. It's easy to set up with a hand-held GPS to show you where you are, and it's "clean" in the sense that there are no complicated backwaters of functionality. You can get your tides from some other source, and if you have an AIS engine you can run another program for it.

I'd say that, if you want to have a play around to try out the computer chart plotting malarky then you'd find it a good start, and you can't really complain at £40.

There are a few free software solutions, but (to my mind) no sensible way of getting UK charts into them.

As I said above, it looks like the Meridian EasyCharts, which has just appeared from the producers of the RYA/UKHO software at £70 may be a good bet.

Offshore Navigator at about £100 is what I use at present, but it does no AIS.

I'd steer clear of the Belfield at about the same price (my opinion).

All of them "work", and there's nothing horrendously difficult about it. The differences are in the ability to connect them to other elements of your navigation systems, the ability to export and import data to files or a handheld GPS, and also the tidal information. (And , of course subjective assessment of "usability".)

The cheap ones I mention here tend to deal in "raster charts" which are just pictures of paper charts. The expensive ones vectorise the charts and know about the things on the chart - e.g., you can click on a light and read about it. To the packages I mention, the light is like any other part of the picture. [somebody will jump on me for this simplification]

You can pay several hundred pounds for a programme which can connect to all your instruments and calculate lay lines, velocity made good to windward and all that stuff.

Just my opinions..

I'm pinning my hopes on EasyCharts at present.

[By the way, my guesses at prices are based on software + the entire UK and Ireland charts.]
 
VicMallows said:
Amulet,

Did you establish whether the AIS function does CPA/TCPA ? Their online literature doesn't include much detail, and rather gives the impression the whole thing is still a 'work-in-progress'?

Vic
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I'm pretty sure it did, but I'm not actually certain. Since I'm not AIS savvy, I didn't probe precisely enough on that subject (my mistake), but it does seem to be the MAIN thing you want from AIS. I have the NASA AIS "radar" which is about as useful as a one-legged man at an arse-kicking contest.

The lad was at the show also couldn't tell me for certain whether I could exchange data with my handheld GPS - Garmin G72 in my case.

Maybe some other forumite who's intends to visit the boat show can probe further. The lad didn't have as deep a knowledge as one would have liked, but at least he didn't bull**** me.

It is something of a "work in progress" as you say, but it starts from the RYA/UKHO plotter, which has seven years of history, so it does have substantial functionality.
 
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.
 
Amulet said:
As I said above, it looks like the Meridian EasyCharts, which has just appeared from the producers of the RYA/UKHO software at £70 may be a good bet.
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Meridian also do SEAtrak UK which is there full ARCS software but bundled with all the 800 or so UK charts. This is £100 (compared to £150 for ARCS SEAtrak with no charts).

This also does AIS and is, I think, a little more fully featured than EasyCharts. Their website is sparse on details of the latter though - but if it is based on the RYA/UKHO software (which I think Meridian wrote for the RYA/UKHO in the first place) it may not allow uploading of waypoints to the GPS.

I had a look at various packages a year or so ago and obtained demo versions of a handful (Meridian's are now available for download from their website - www.meridian-chartware.co.uk). I was pretty impressed with SEAtrak, and certainly thought it easier to use and with more useful features than Belfield. It's interface is a little dated in some ways (Windows 95 origins), but perhaps that's no bad thing as it's easy to use and seems to do everything short of routeing/laylines which, as someone said above, is really the preserve of much more expensive packages.

No connection with Meridian and I should add that for other reasons I didn't buyit or any other package and so haven't used it in anger.
 
Just read through this long thread. Also gone through the article - I was intending to comment in this forum about that in any case:

The last page of that includes the statement: "For a long time GPSNavX has been the only option for sailors who wanted to use a Mac for navigation". Surprised that so far there this has not been a challenged, it is is not true!

I use a MacBook on my boat. On it, I have installed the really outstanding software "Passage Plus"
http://www.windvector.com/passageplus/overview.html
Does no one else here use a Mac? Also why did PBO miss that out?

Like most, I do have a Chart-plotter installed on-board. The main reason for the duplication with the Laptop, was that it could display AIS. In conjunction with the NASA 'engine' it does this brilliantly, plus also several things the installed plotter does not do, measuring distance travelled being one,so I'm real pleased with it. One other point; it is British! The other software mentioned is American.

Like others, I think the article is pretty flawed. Surely a main reason for using a lap-top on a boat would be to display AIS? Many of the older plotters do not do this. But the "tests" makes minimal mention regarding this facility.
 
PhilipF said:
I use a MacBook on my boat. On it, I have installed the really outstanding software "Passage Plus"
http://www.windvector.com/passageplus/overview.html
Does no one else here use a Mac? Also why did PBO miss that out?

Like most, I do have a Chart-plotter installed on-board. The main reason for the duplication with the Laptop, was that it could display AIS. In conjunction with the NASA 'engine' it does this brilliantly, plus also several things the installed plotter does not do, measuring distance travelled being one,so I'm real pleased with it. One other point; it is British! The other software mentioned is American.
Click to expand...

This was reviewed in January's YM. Was it correct in saying you can only plan on one chart at a time?
 
PhilipF said:
I use a MacBook on my boat. On it, I have installed the really outstanding software "Passage Plus"
http://www.windvector.com/passageplus/overview.html
Does no one else here use a Mac? Also why did PBO miss that out?
Click to expand...

I use a Mac, and looked at PassagePlus as well. Looked good, but cannot remember if it is true you can only route plan on a single chart.

The main problem for those who don't need global coverage but want more than ten or so charts is being tied to ARCS (for the UK). They look great and the update service is second to none, but the cost adds up very quickly compared to packages offering the whole UK for £60 - £100.

Separate from the argument that the UKHO should make it's charts available for free (I am actually not convinced) there is I think an argument that the ARCS skipper service is due for a hefty price cut.

I understand that the writers of PassagePlus are talking to UKHO about an iPad version which sounds promising.
 
DavyMac said:
Separate from the argument that the UKHO should make it's charts available for free (I am actually not convinced) there is I think an argument that the ARCS skipper service is due for a hefty price cut.
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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.
 
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