Raymarine Chartplotter Error - Tough!

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TradewindSailor

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I sent the following to Raymarine twice by email. They have never replied. Suggestions please:

My C70 unit fails to display high resolution (less than 12m range) in the vicinity of 180 deg longitude. This is of great concern to me as I enjoy cruising in this area.

I received the following reply from your US Moderator in the Technical Forum:

Quote ...

We have received a response from Navionics indicating that the feature which you have described appears to be rooted in the Navionics software development libraries which had been available during the period that the retired C-Series Classic MFD software had been developed and supported. Correction of this problem would require that corrected Navionics software development libraries be received, that the C-Series Classic MFD software compiled/linked, and then fully tested to ensure that the libraries did not introduce unintended changes ... a significant effort which may also not be possible as the C-Series Classic MFDs were already stretched for internal memory. Unfortunately, as the C-Series Classic MFDs have been retired for some time, no further software updates are planned these MFDs and this will remain a feature of these MFDs.

Should you desire to discuss this further with a Raymarine representative, it is recommended that Tom Green be contacted at Raymarine's Asia-Pacific Headquarters. Please accept our apologies for this chartplotter feature limitation.
End Quote

Whilst I understand your problem ...... I used to develop ship based computer programmes many years ago ..... I am left with an expensive piece of equipment that is no more use than a radar display in my favourite cruising ground.

It is unlikely that this fault has remained unknown to you considering your rigorous testing of the software. If it was known to you you had an obligation to advise your customers of the fault and to correct it as soon as it was known.

I need a chart plotter / radar unit of at least the spec of the C70 that operates in a reliable manner. I rely on you to propose a solution.
=====

I have never received any reply from Tom Green or the Asia-Pacific Headquarters.


If you have a Raymarine Chartplotter or indeed any chartplotter using Navionics software, I suggest you make sure it is not suffering from a similar fault.
 
AngusMcDoon said:
I blame the computer nerds.
Click to expand...

nerds or no, they're carp at testing. I posted 2 years ago about the Raymarine E7 and Navionics Gold charts for Norway and Svalbard. Navionics own app won't render N of 75 degrees, (pretty useless as Svalbard is between ~77 and ~80) and the E7 wouldn't N of 78. This is ladybird book chapter 1 of software testing: you always do boundary testing.

I showed this bug to both reps at the same time at LIBS, both blamed the other company and both promised to follow up. Neither did. I had bought the Navionics chart by then - a dead waste of £200 - but luckily hadn't yet spent the several thousand I had put aside for upgrading plotter and radar - Raymarine's loss.

I wouldn't touch Navionics: I know it's hardly statistically proven, but 100% of all gross errors I've seen with electronic nav have been due to Navionics chart errors (I guess this is only 10 or so cases, which is why it's not statistically valid). But it does illustrate that Navionics are poor at testing and/or at fixing bugs once they are pointed out.

So unless and until Raymarine allow their plotters to use alternative charts which can be trusted I won't buy from them.

I bought Livecharts from Euronav which, together with SeaPro, worked fine (the odd s/w 'feature', but acceptable).
 
jdc said:
Navionics Gold charts for Norway and Svalbard. Navionics own app won't render N of 75 degrees, (pretty useless as Svalbard is between ~77 and ~80)
Click to expand...

That's madness, as it presumably implies that they never even looked at that particular chart in the most basic "production" scenario?

I can't promise that all the testing I've seen has always been perfect, but we certainly hammer the install-and-first-steps verification just before release, to avoid the embarrassing situation where a customer puts the disk in the machine and it just flat-out doesn't work.

Pete
 
Problems at geographic extremes occur in all sorts of situations. I know - I had to deal with the South Pole and the 180 degree meridian, both at once! Unfortunately, nearly all the software for handling the display of geographic data on a flat surface tends to operate "differently" around 180 degrees E, and a lot has problems at 90 N or S!

There is a fundamental underlying truth, and that is that a spherical surface cannot be represented on a flat plane without distortion and interruptions. This is simply a fact of the topologies involved and can't be overcome; if you doubt me try peeling an orange and flattening it without either breaking the skin of the orange or distorting it!

Most software simply allows you to choose where the interruption in the map is, and move it away from your area of interest. Global display systems have to have some sort of "fudge" that seamlessly and silently moves the interruption so it doesn't interfere with your viewing. Sadly, algorithms to do this tend to misbehave when presented with a line where one side of it is +179.99999 degrees and the other side is -179.999 degrees! There are other problems associated with "bounding boxes" of features that cross the 180 degree line - does the box extend the short way across the line, or the long way, round the whole Earth? "Bounding boxes" are used to determine which features are chosen for display from the database, so this sounds like the problem the OP is encountering. I ensured that an important GIS standard (GML) could handle this situation, but if I hadn't been there, it might not have been considered.

Of course, it can be overcome, and routinely is in applications like Google Earth. But it requires additional software tests for special cases, and I can quite understand the problems in a memory limited set of software.

It could be worse - a lot of Garmin GPSMap systems won't display parts of the Earth north of 80N or south of 60S. As my whole area of interest was south of 60, that was a problem!

I'm afraid understanding the problem doesn't help your situation. Did you make it clear when you bought the equipment that your area of operations was near 180? If you did, and if you bought it under UK consumer law, then you have a case - the equipment is clearly not fit for purpose. However, I am afraid most countries don't have such consumer friendly laws, and "Caveat Emptor" tends to hold.
 
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It would be interesting to know how many complaints Raymarine have had about this problem. I find it very hard to believe that I am the first as Raymarine are inferring!

Raymarine won't be on my shopping list ever again! Last time I bought any marine electronics I bought a Simrad AP24 autopilot that was about twice the price of the equivalent Raymarine product, and it has operated faultlessly. I guess you have to pay a price for reliability, and reliability is what I need when I take my yacht offshore.
 
Good morning TradewindSailor,

I'm Tom Green, I'm the Technical Services Manager at Raymarine Asia in Sydney. One of my colleagues in the UK picked up on your post and forwarded to me.

Firstly: my apologies that you've tried to contact me and had no response. If you did so by email, the most common cause of a failure-to-respond is if you inadvertently used a .com.au rather than .com email address. I should say however that we're a relatively small office - a fraction of the size of the US and UK sites - and at this peak season we're not always able to respond to people as quickly as we'd like by email. I'd recommend that if you - or any other Raymarine owner - needs support urgently you call us on 02 8977 0300. Two other knowledgeable technical support staff and myself would be happy to do our best to help.

Regarding the C70: I would agree that it's unlikely you're the first person to run across this, but I've been working in this part of the world for nearly 7 years now (I've was with Raymarine UK for 8 years before that) and I can't at this moment recollect another similar complaint, so it's not commonplace.
The C70 is, as my colleague in the US says, both limited in its hardware capabilities and now 2 generations and many years old. Had we been having this discussion whilst the C70 was still a current product (we stopped selling it about 5 years ago) then the situation with regards a software upgrade might have been quite different - is this something which you've only recently come across?

Since we're not in a position to be able to resolve this Navionics issue for you in the C70, I'd like to suggest that if you can contact us directly (by phone at the number above or by email to aus dot support at raymarine dot com) then we'll see what we can work out with you on an upgrade to a newer and more capable chartplotter that will not suffer from the same issue.

Finally, I'd like to touch on a couple of points about this specific problem and software issues in general:
The point that jdc made about alternate cartography sources is well made, and I am pleased to be able to say that in the future owners of Raymarine's current range of multifunction displays will have a choice about the cartography they use. We will be introducing with the next release of Lighthouse software for the current a-, c-, e- and gS-Series displays a new cartography engine which will use Raymarine-supplied charts (over which we obviously have full control.) Initially these charts will only be available in the US but other regions will of course follow. You can see a preview of this at http://www.raymarine.com/view/?id=8291
Secondly and lastly: the original A-, C-, E- and G-Series displays were highly successful and very popular, but one significant limitation that they had was that each used a distinct architecture which meant that we had to do a lot of duplication in software development. The net result of this was an average of one major software release every 1-2 years. The current multifunction displays all share a common platform which has helped speed up our ability to respond to problems or introduce new features to a major release every ~3-4 months (we are about to release version 9 software, for displays which first shipped at the start of 2012.)

NS
 
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