The Navionics charts also panned and scrolled much slower than raster or vector charts loaded onto the hard drive. To prevent unauthorized copying, Navionics charts reside on an external card reader, which restricts data transfer to the rate allowed by the USB connection (a computer with the USB 2 standard will be faster than older machines with USB 1). This is an unfortunate side-effect of Navionics copyright security and hardware limitations that affects chart display speed and responsiveness–neither of which is Northport's fault.
Navigating across charts was also more difficult than necessary, consistently requiring the Map>Open Map>Map Library feature(remember, the program refers to charts as maps). Most other applications allow a simple double-click in a chart outline to load a new chart.
WAYPOINTS AND ROUTES
Marine ENC receives high marks for operations such as creating routes, transferring data and managing data. It was less smooth in creating waypoints and managing waypoint icons.
Creating a waypoint falls victim to the mouse-heavy interface we mentioned earlier. You can't simply double-click on a chart to create a waypoint or double-click on a waypoint icon to edit its name or description. However, waypoints can include a comment, be hidden from the display, be locked to prevent unintentional changes, or be linked to an image or sound file.
Fugawi; Northpoint SystemsMarine ENC prioritizes data portability. The Waypoint Library shows a seamless GPX import of 1,187 waypoints created in another charting and navigation application.
Routes are exceptionally easy to create by selecting and dragging waypoints. By displaying the Route Library, Display Route, and Waypoint Library windows at the same time, you can drag-and-drop collections of waypoints directly from your Waypoint Library to the Route Details window and a route is instantly created from those waypoints. Use shift + click to highlight a selection of waypoints and control + click to select a collection of non-contiguous waypoints.
Alternatively, routes can be created in the traditional manner, by linking a sequence of existing waypoints. You can also freehand draw a route on the chart with your cursor in Route Mode. The course you freehand trace on the chart is automatically converted to a series of straight line segments, the "granularity" or number of which is determined by your Cross Track Error setting
Each waypoint, route or point of interest can be marked with one of literally hundreds of icons–as we said, maybe too many icons. One feature we would have liked is the ability to customize a subset of about 10 common icons, such as marina, anchorage, fuel or restaurant. Unfortunately, each time you set a waypoint icon you must scroll through the full collection, sorting through icons for buses, hikers, airplanes and helicopters.
Having said that, waypoint and route management is excellent using the Waypoint Library and Route Library windows. You can create subfolders to organize your waypoints and move waypoints between folders simply by clicking-and-dragging. To help you visualize your waypoint folders, the nested organization is shown with a tree structure view. This excellent and very organized treatment of waypoint and route data is an important feature for boaters with many waypoints for different regions.
Unfortunately, unlike many charting and navigation applications, Marine ENC does not have a way to search for waypoints on a chart. There is no "Go To..." menu choice and no way to type in the first few letters of a waypoint name and go there. Instead it is a cumbersome panning and zooming search process, typically beginning with the world base map.
But Marine ENC was a champ when it came to importing and exporting waypoint data. We easily imported 1,187 East Coast waypoints using GPX (GPS Exchange Format). Marine ENC does not limit descriptions and all our information on each waypoint imported successfully. Although the software also imports and exports in ASCII text format, we recommend using the newer, more reliable GPX transfer if it is available to you.
Indeed, Northport has made GPS data transfer a priority–not surprising for a company that began making GPS software. You can import and export routes between a handheld GPS and your PC simply by clicking command buttons, and data can also be shared with Navionics-compatible plotters via memory card.
