Which way is up

[scottie]

I always use the plotter north up but others prefer head up

I believe that radar may be better other way any preferences and why?
Does the location make a difference ie chart table n up helm head up more intuitive?

I raised this on the siting debate but may be worth steppe rate discussion.

 

[duncan99210]

North up - can't abide it any other way for the chart. However, just to be different, the radar is alway course up - easier for my brain to cope with like that.

 

[Skylark]

For most of my sailing I favour North Up. I find it sometimes helpful to change to Course Up on large scale, for example when entering an unfamiliar harbour.

 

[Boathook]

Radar is head up. Paper charts north up until I pick them up and work with them in hand, then head up. This is normally at the end of a long sail when tired and entering some place in the dark when lights don't match the paperwork .....

 

[jordanbasset]

I prefer North up, makes sense to me.

My wife prefers course up, end of discussion

 

[VicMallows]

Definitely North Up for me. I always find it hideous when I see walkers turning their O/S maps around to make them head-up. But why not just do whichever suits YOU best?

 

[Coaster]

I prefer North up, makes sense to me.

My wife prefers course up, end of discussion

My wife and I have similar preferences but we've agreed to use North up.

As our radar display is on our chart plotter, at the helm, radar is also shown North up.

 

[rob2]

I dont have/use either, but like others have said when on passage one becomes accustomed to reading a chart North up. It's easier to estimate by eye where the course you are steering is taking you realtive to obstructions - land, shallows and the like. A radar is all about your current relative bearings, so with a dedicated screen heading up gives a more intuitive understanding of what you see.

And yes, inside a harbour I can be seen rotating the Reeds chartlet to try to make it line up with what I can see!

Rob.

 

[alanwilson]

North up is favourite: but there are problems you need to be aware of.
Paper charts are North up (there's no way you can keep turning them round to match your heading), and charts, plotter & radar should match (especially if you are overlaying them!). Having a mixture of North & Head up is a recipe for disaster, especially when stressed eg in fog.
However if the radar is North up, when moving at low speed (typically less than 1kt), the radar may not get accurate heading info from the GPS, so may show as Anything up and you don't know where you're going.
That caused a collision between a yacht & a ship in the Channel some years ago, in fog: the yacht slowed right down and didn't realise the radar was no longer showing the right orientation. They altered course in a spiral, right into the path of the ship.

 

[LadyInBed]

As I understand it, to successfully use a Radar N up it needs to be fed with a decent (expensive) flux gate compass.
I use chart plotter and Radar head up, to my mind it is much more logical - left is left and right is right, and I know exactly which direction to look in when I get an AIS contact without having to refer it to the compass.

 

[ffiill]

North up for normal use but when entering a difficult harbour Eg Arisaig bay would tend to go for course up as working out the way in through shoals and rocks I find easier if I dont have to turn the chart in my head.

 

[maxi77]

I must admit I was trained to use North Up radar and prefer it but without a good stable north reference (the normal for a yacht without a gyro compass) head up is the only sensible option. For plotters north up is no problem and I am happy with it though I suspect I could get used to head up.

 

[srm]

Plotter and radar north up for me, all the time. That way I always know what I am looking at and have an instant heading reference on the radar screen. I use the wheelpilot compass to give north to radar as both Raymarine. Without north reference on radar its too easy to steer the wrong way when using it for pilotage in poor vis (as I had confirmed when skippering a charter yacht and the charterer thought it easier to understand course up!).

 

[westernman]

I guess it depends whether you are primarily using the radar as a navigation aid or for collision avoidance. If the latter, I would have thought you would always want it head up. For the former, north up would make more sense to me.

I have radar, and only used it one a couple of occasions. In both of those cases for collision avoidance in fog, with no navigational hazards in the vicinity - head up on the radar for me.

 

[Oldhairy]

Male/Female preference

Personally I prefer everything N up but when working as OOW on merchant ships I found that female Officers almost universally had the RADAR and plotter on Head Up.
It used to drive the Old Man batty when he visited the bridge.
There is no right and wrong. Do what suits you.

 

[nigelmercier]

For most of my sailing I favour North Up. I find it sometimes helpful to change to Course Up on large scale, for example when entering an unfamiliar harbour.

I do the same on my TomTom in towns.

 

[Sandy]

Paper charts are North up (there's no way you can keep turning them round to match your heading),

On deck I always have them course up; just turn the chart. At the table its North up but I am doing different things with them down there.

 

[flaming]

Plotter always in North Up.

Radar - it depends. When used in overlay mode then always North up. When used as stand alone then I would use in head up when the boat's course is pretty stable, but if you're sailing hard down wind and the boat's course is oscilating through 10 degrees or more I find judging the risk of collision easier with a North up display, as in my experience the system does a decent job of matching returns to a compass bearing - rather than the position on the screen being more dependant on the exact heading of your boat than relative movement.