EDITOR'S NOTE: Today begins a weekly series on computer-based navigation and electronic charting. For more about this series and why we wrote it, please see our Room 13 blog.
Armchair travel has always been about imagination, but armchair navigation these days can actually get you somewhere, just fire up your laptop and go.
Take, for example, a cruise up the Potomac River in Washington DC. Type "Washington Channel" into a search field and a full-color nautical chart appears on your screen. You can see markers, marinas and depths as you scroll upriver setting waypoints. Mouse-click on the bridges and windows pop up showing the vertical clearance for each. Click again and you might see a satellite image of the Georgetown waterfront. Scroll to the anchorage at Three Sisters, zoom in and mark your destination. The entire trip can be planned without unfurling a chart or setting foot on the boat.
This is no futuristic scenario, it is navigation software today.
With large databases of electronic charts widely available, often for free, and more than a dozen vendors selling sophisticated programs to make use of them, computer-based navigation has never been more accessible. Boaters can gather more quality information and plan routes with more precision than ever before, all from a laptop that can be taken anywhere.
The Georgetown waterfront in Washington DC, as seen using free Coastal Explorer trial software and a free NOAA raster chart. Both were downloaded easily.
Yet creating a computer-based system can still be frustrating. There are a bewildering range of products available that vary widely in quality and cost. There is also little about electronic charting that could be described as plug-and-play. Loading the software, configuring it to speak to the instruments on your boat and then coaxing it to deliver on its promises can leave even tech-savvy boaters scratching their heads.
Furthermore, navigation software is one area in which good advice can be hard to find. What worked well on your friend's catamaran may not be well suited to your trawler. The system your electronics dealer raves about may be too complicated for your tastes, or too limited. And buying a well-known brand name or paying a bit more does not necessarily yield a better product.
To help sort it all out, Mad Mariner is launching a weekly series dedicated to eliminating some of the mystery. Throughout the rest of the year, we will look at what you need to set up a laptop-based electronic charting system, including hardware, software, external devices and charts.
We will explain how electronic charting works, decipher some of the jargon and review the process of obtaining charts on the Internet. We will also explore the software used to work with these charts, including a full-length test and evaluation of every major product on the market. The result, we hope, will be a definitive resource that can help you make decisions about how to best harness the powerful resources now available.
FLEXIBLE AND FEATURE RICH
Getting started in computer-based navigation is far less confusing if you take the time to understand what is available in the marketplace, how those products are evolving and what you need on your boat to take advantage of them. In short, the "for dummies" approach works well here.
For starters, electronic charting is nothing new. Many of us have chart plotters onboard made by Garmin, Raymarine, Furuno or other manufacturers. These units draw upon charts, often provided by companies like C-Map or Navionics, that usually reside on a memory chip or an integral hard drive. The resulting system is a good one, time tested, easy to use and more than sufficient for many boaters.
