<from 27 January>
Jeff Sanders from Coastal Explorer which makes Rose Point is covering PC Navigation right now. I’ll jot down some key notes and my overall impressions for seminars I attend. Note, I showed up a little late.
Basics
Laptops work great, get as much RAM as you can afford. Add on a wireless mouse that you can move around the boat and use with repeater displays so you can use\see the same PC Screen in multiple places onboard.
GPS
Get a unit with plotting capabilities as a back up to your PC in case it dies. This is a nice PC-like backup before you’re forced to go to paper. NMEA 0183 is the standard you want to look for in your GPS (anything you buy new you’re good). Differential GPS or WAAS are two different mechanisms for increasing the accuracy of your GPS; most new GPS units support both of these.
NMEA 2000 is a new standard based on Ethernet; it is not standardized across different brands so you can’t use different devices all on the same network. Unless you’re a geek or having your stuff professionally installed, I’d stick with NMEA 0183. The cool thing about NMEA 2000 is you can hook all kinds of sensors up like engine temperature gauges, water fuel level, etc..
USB to Serial Adapter - Lots of laptops do not have Serial Ports today so you can use a
Radar Overlay
Showing the radar image on the navigation chart is one of the newer features that “really demystifies radar” the images from the radar overlaid on the navigation chart is very easy to understand. Jeff did not cover what’s needed to do this.
Electronic Charts
More and more charts are available online for cheaper and or free.
Raster Charts – Image based chartings, looks like paper
Vector Charts – Chart rendered on the fly by the PC. Much smaller file sizes, but not as widely available for all areas.
The data driven vector charts allow the PC to help with navigation by telling you’ve plotted over land or in shallow water for instance.
3-D Charts – Interesting comment from Jeff, these are not accurate foot by foot drawings, they are more general and give you the feel for the area, but they are not accurate and meant for navigation like a chart.
US Charts are widely available as free as well as different purchase options. For Canada you will need to buy charts.
Navigation Software
Features
- Quilting – stitching together different charts to show them all as one visually seamless charts on the screen
- Weather – Not race quality pinpoint information, but instead it’s a good general weather data source
- Chart Rotation – Allows you to show the chart in Course Up mode, as opposed to always being North up for instance.
- Raster, Vector, Photo, Topo
- Autopilot
- Tides and Currents – Handy to have right in front of you.
- AIS Receiver (3 people had AIS in the audience)
- Allows you to see all the commercial traffic (and some recreational traffic) in the area your antenna can see. It shows the large boats on your chart, their direction, name and destination.
- When Offshore a masthead antenna can show you boats in a 100 mile radius, very handy.
<Jeff ran a little long and went to questions at this point.>
I asked about the availability of Tidal Data world wide, and this is available from the British (The Sun Never Set on The Empire) and Nobeltec does supports this.
Overall this was a good 101 level class on the basics, I didn’t learn much, but I’m a pretty big geek working in the computer industry. I was surprised that Canada does not have free charts, I’ll have to look into that and I was happy to hear about the global tide data, but disappointed it comes at an extra cost (but not surprised).