When the U.S. government announced the release of its entire digital chart library for free two years ago, it was a Canadian software company that first stepped forward to take advantage of the new resource.

Northport Systems Inc., which began making GPS mapping software, had already created products such as Fugawi Marine ENC and Fugawi Global Navigator for marine applications, so the appeal of the charts was obvious. Today, Fugawi Marine ENC remains one of the major offerings in the market and continues to add new functions and data sets far faster than many of its competitors.You might think of Marine ENC as the "Swiss Army knife" of navigation software. It is designed to view many different types of data, from topographic maps and satallite images to nautical charts and street data. It is also highly compatible across platforms, meaning you can use it on a computer, a PDA, or a portable GPS.

Fugawi is the perfect package for world adventurers who want different maps and charts to facilitate a wide range of hobbies: boating and canoeing, offshore and lake fishing, hiking and climbing. For those interested in viewing many types of cartography on many different devices, it is a very good option.

Viewed strictly as a marine package, however, Marine ENC is a mixed bag. While it offers many different data sets–including the ability to use Navionics charts with a card reader, as well as some rare international options–boaters who use only nautical charts may find the interface cluttered with information and options they never use. Furthermore, while the company offers first-rate tech support, many users may find themselves using it more than they would like, thanks to a difficult startup process.

In short, whether Fugawi suits your needs is going to depend largely on what you do with your boat and your life-style on land.

PURCHASING FUGAWI

We tested the latest version of Fugawi Marine ENC (4.5) because it is the Northport product that most directly targets the marine market, and it has an established base of users. Their other Fugawi product, Global Navigator, is a more general offering covering land, sea and air for use on a PC, handheld GPS or PDA. Even so, Marine ENC still contains many features for hikers, small boaters and lake fishermen, and its roots as a general mapping application are well in evidence. It even refers to nautical charts as "maps."

Fugawi Marine ENC is available as a boxed set, available directly from Northport Systems (see link below), or through retailers. The $279.95 set includes an installation CD, two Data Pack DVDs, a 40-page Getting Started Manual, and a Navionics Multi Card Reader with documentation. Our first impression was extremely positive. The software is professionally packaged and had us excited to try its features and the included "extras."

When you purchase Marine ENC, you choose one of four Fugawi Bonus Data Packs–U.S., Canada, Europe, or International. The U.S. pack includes all raster and vector charts from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, as well as vector charts from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers covering U.S. inland waterways.

Coastal water bathymetric data, elevation data, street overlay data and landmark data for the U.S., as well as a digital version of the MPC Boaters Directory and a world background map, were also included. The Canadian Data Pack is comparable. The Europe and International Data Packs include primarily street, landmark, and elevation data.

Note that the Data Packs are on DVD while the installation software is on CD, so your PC must have a DVD drive in order to read and import the charts.

Since Fugawi Marine ENC includes all available NOAA raster and vector charts, you're all set if you are only cruising in U.S. coastal or inland waters. For Canadian or international boaters, you must purchase supplemental digital charts. No other country provides their nautical chart files for free.

However, there is another bonus: The Navionics Multi Card Reader, a small USB device, lets you read Navionics chart cards within Marine ENC. If you already own Navionics digital charts on Compact Flash, Secure Digital, or MultiMedia cards such as Gold, Gold+, or Silver charts, you're in luck. You'll also want the card reader to transfer routes between your PC and a Navionics-compatible chartplotter such as the Raymarine C- or E-Series.

It will be easier to navigate through your data if you have a copy of NOAA's Catalog of Charts & Publications. These brochures, which display the chart numbers and their boundaries, are available for free at any marine store that sells NOAA paper charts. Alternatively, you can download state-by-state chart catalogs in PDF format directly from NOAA (see link below).

GETTING STARTED

We had no trouble installing the software or reading in our Navionics Gold+ charts using the Navionics card reader. The software took over with window prompts and the installation was very straightforward. If you do have problems getting your card reader to work, you may need a software update. Instructions on how to obtain one are on the Fugawi website (see link below).

However, be prepared for some frustration and delay when you first load your own charts or the data on the Bonus Data Pack. Installing the data from the Data Pack ran up several hours of calls to Canada until we collectively figured out workarounds to install one data set at a time. Through all these tech support calls, Fugawi remained extremely responsive and friendly. But don't say we didn't warn you. We had heard Fugawi Marine ENC could be a bit difficult to get up and running–and it was.Fugawi; Northpoint SystemsThe Map Library allows flexible organization of charts and maps. Note the separate folders for Maptech BSB4s, Navionics charts and street maps.

The quirky Canada-centric registration process is your first warning that this may be a bit bumpy. Prompting you for a province and then erasing all of your U.S. entered data will definitely have you shaking your head. In the end, if the bonus data will not install, there are excellent instructions on the Fugawi website (see link below). If those do not help, contact tech support.

Before loading additional charts, you should develop an organizational strategy to manage your chart files and folders. Loading newer versions of charts you already have will likely create duplicate charts in the Chart Library. You must isolate or remove potential duplicates manually, checking for the most current edition. The program does not automatically identify and display the most recent addition to your chart collection. For example, if your chart folder contains three charts of Miami Harbor, the software simply takes the first one in the folder, regardless of whether it is the most recent chart. If you are a folder slob, mend your ways or be very careful using this program.

A set of Navionics charts, stored on a cartridge and accessed through the card reader, are a worthwhile extra. For example, a single $179 16XG Gold+ card gives you a lot of charts and additional data, including coverage of the entire U.S. East Coast, Florida Keys, Bahamas and Bermuda, and much of the West Coast of Florida. In addition, they include street name overlay data, tides and currents, and marina locations–all with a trouble-free data installation.

When it came to hardware, Marine ENC worked well with our external USB GPS sensor and the setup was straightforward. The software also integrates with AIS information if you connect an AIS receiver to your PC, and Marine ENC added extensive AIS features as part of the version 4.5 update. Vessels that are transmitting an AIS signal are color-coded to indicate whether they are underway or stationary. The outline of the vessel is drawn to scale and shows its name, type, track, and current heading.

It is also worth noting that Marine ENC can be run on a Pocket PC or Palm device, though we did not test the software on anything more portable than a laptop.

LOOK AND FEEL

Marine ENC utilizes a standard interface based on menus and icon toolbars. You can easily pan over charts with the mouse and zoom with the scroll wheel. Functions can be accessed through a main menu or through toolbars that place the cursor into a "mode" to perform certain functions, such as creating a waypoint or measuring distance and bearing. We would have liked more right-click contextual menus, but the right-click button was usually designated for a zoom-out feature.

In addition to the main menu across the top, a Status Bar shows information such as GPS location, cursor location and chart datum. Two toolbars include icons for functions such as opening charts, panning and zooming, and shortcuts for routes, tracks and waypoints.Fugawi; Northpoint SystemsNorth-Up or Course-Up? The Map Orientation window allows the user to choose several options.

The interface is heavily based on icons, many of which were not very intuitive. It took some effort to memorize them all. The fact that some of the icons had to be labeled with letters, such as WP for waypoint and RTE for route, suggests that words may be a better choice than the current icon system. The user interface also has a dated Windows feel. Icons are pixelized and limited to garish primary colors, and the floating windows utilize designs and features reminiscent of older programs.

In addition, the frame of menus and toolbars cramps the chart display area, which is also often obscured by working windows, such as the Waypoint Library or Routes Library. There were some adjustments that helped. You can m ake your own "window drawers" with the Waypoint Library and Route Library by pulling them off the bottom edge of your screen, letting you read the window title but clearing the screen for the chart.

Fugawi Marine ENC is also a very mouse-intensive program. Because its user interface is based on cursor modes, a user has to commute back and forth to the toolbar to switch modes for different operations. Keyboard shortcuts, the typical way to avoid extensive mousing, were limited. The program can be extra effort on the hands and wrists if you use it extensively.

We understand through discussions with Northport officials that the user interface is undergoing a major overhaul as we speak. Future versions of Marine ENC will likely benefit from this effort.

On the positive side, Marine ENC wins high marks for a customizable display and experience. You can set imperial, metric or nautical units. Soundings can be set in meters or feet (although feet are not rounded to whole numbers, which can clutter the chart display). One particularly nice customized setting is depth area shading. You can set the chart display colors by depth, customizing safe water boundaries for your vessel's draft. It also has a dusk and night vision display.

Finally, this is the first package we've reviewed in this series that allows charts to be displayed north-up, map-up, course-up, route-up or–unique to Fugawi–by an arbitrary degree of rotation.

WORKING WITH CHART FILES

One of Marine ENC's strengths is its compatibility with a wide variety of chart formats, including NOAA raster and vector charts; Army Corps of Engineers IENC vector charts; BSB4 or earlier charts from Maptech; files in GEO/NOS format (formerly SoftChart); and NDI DigitalOcean charts for Canada. It can also read user-scanned paper charts and, with a card reader, Navionics Gold, Gold+, Platinum, Silver, Fish'N'Chip, and HotMaps charts. Many charting and navigation programs are weak when it comes to international coverage. But with the Navionics option, Marine ENC gives you access to digital charts for much of the world.

Overall, Marine ENC was very responsive. It was most responsive when displaying raster charts. Some operations were noticeably slower, particularly 3D viewing, but this is to be expected given the demands placed on your machine by 3D data. Another snag was that panning on vector charts sometimes resulted in a lag with a motion-blurred display, where depths and contours smear across the screen until the display catches up. This blurred motion was a bit dizzying and not typical of most other programs.

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.

ADDITIONAL DATA

Marine ENC's additional data comes on the Bonus Data Pack DVDs, which are included with the software. The discs include elevation data, street name overlays, landmark data based on the MPC Boaters Directory, and bathymetric depth data. Tide and current data is available to users utilizing Navionics chart cartridges.

The elevation data is used for 3D displays. Once you have the data loaded, simply choose File>Open>3D>Show 3D Window. You can seamlessly fly over this landscape using your mouse or a collection of 13 keyboard shortcuts. However, because many shorelines are relatively flat, this feature has limited value for boaters. Marine ENC has bathymetric data, but the depths do not display in 3D.

The Places Menu lets you search for cities and streets. As you zoom in on a chart, smaller street names continue to fill in. This street map overlay is handy for boaters, either to identify an anchorage (which are often at street ends) or to locate services using an address.

The MPC Boaters Directory of the U.S. is a searchable directory of 1.8 million places and 25,000 marine services. These can be plotted as an optional overlay on a chart. Because this directory is an advertising-based listing of marine services, and therefore not comprehensive, we generally don't rely on it.

Neither the street nor the directory data are as high in quality as one would find on a dedicated street atlas program or in the POI (points-of-interest) data contained in other marine-only software packages. But, if you have third-party BSB format charts, such as those from Maptech or NDI Digital Ocean, you can view their marine facilities and photo location data using Marine ENC.

Fugawi Marine ENC includes the ability to download and display GRIB weather data. Simply select ENC>Weather (GRIB)>Retrieve Data Via Email from the main menu and a window opens prompting you for the desired area and time. A GRIB file with data for surface wind, 500 millibar height, wave, surface temperature, or air temperature data will arrive immediately in your email inbox as an attachment.

Fugawi; Northpoint SystemsWe applaud vendors who leverage free Internet resources and Northport did just that. Here, a Google Earth side-by-side helps define a poorly-aided Bahamian channel.

Marine ENC recently provided a free Google Earth plug-in that lets you automatically download Google Earth images of your current location. A particularly nice feature is the split screen display, letting you view an aerial image–showing actual sandbars, channel openings, and coral reefs–next to a marine chart of the same area.

You'll need a fast Internet connection to download these images–Google Earth hogs bandwidth–but Marine ENC allows you to save them to your hard drive so they are ready to use later when underway. Waypoints and routes can be uploaded to Google Earth with a single mouse click, displaying your points on a satellite view. You can also send this data to others to communicate location or for use as a float plan.

In order to take advantage of Marine ENC's Google Earth feature, you need two free downloads: Google Earth–you must have version 4 or later–and the Fugawi plug-in (see links below).

SOUNDS AND PHOTOS

It seems straightforward, but many charting and navigation programs fall short on the seemingly-simple feature of printing chart excerpts. With the exception of one bug, Marine ENC has excellent printing features.

You can select an area of a chart to print by clicking and dragging a rectangle, or set a print area based on a list of waypoints or a route. A particularly useful print feature lets you scale the waypoint data labels on your printout. You can customize the printing of waypoint labels to make the text bigger if you have trouble reading them, or smaller if densely-placed waypoints are obscuring chart features.

Unfortunately, we could not print vector charts at high resolution with our HP 1200 DPI printer and 380 megabytes of memory. We also tried our Epson C88+ color printer, but this didn't solve the problem. Vector charts would print in "draft mode," but were coarse and unreadable.

If you like cool–but maybe less practical–features, you'll like Marine ENC's option of linking digital sounds and photos to a waypoint. You can link a WAV file of a red wolf howl from the Alligator River NWR in North Carolina or link a JPG file showing the scenery at your favorite anchorage in Maine. The feature is very easy: highlight the waypoint and click on the Links tab, selecting the file to attach.

Marine ENC also includes some quick and handy tools. For example, there is a tool to calculate distances, including both the rhumb line and great circle distances; a tool to calculate magnetic variation; an odometer tool; and a tool for sunrise and sunset times.

CUSTOMER SUPPORT

The software package includes a helpful Getting Started manual, but don't neglect the detailed 142-page User's Guide which is included as a PDF document on the setup CD. We recommend immediately printing this PDF and creating a binder. Its format–brief step-by-step directions, coupled with lots of screen shots–makes it easy to follow along chapter-by-chapter. Fugawi Marine ENC also includes On-Line Help Files, which you access by pressing the F1 key from any point in the program.

Technical support is available to all registered users, but you must register within 30 days of purchasing your software license or you lose this option. Although technical support is available by phone or fax, the company does not provide toll-free numbers, so U.S. customers pay international calling rates. Technical support is also available by email, which is a cheaper, albeit slower, option.

Fugawi's website has a page for Troubleshooting & Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs). The latter addresses only five issues, including configuring a GPS, port problems with a serial-to-USB converter and the Data Pack import problems noted above. For users who hate to read manuals, this page includes online training videos to learn how to use Marine ENC. Many important and relevant technical specifications are also detailed here, such as a list of supported GPS receivers and PDA devices. Another nice contribution is their NMEA cable diagram to help you hook up your onboard Garmin GPS.

Northport Systems has gone even further by providing additional troubleshooting software utilities and documentation as free downloads (see link below). For example, these resources help you convert file formats, obtain and setup drivers for third-party devices, and provide sample data files to test AIS or GRIB weather features. The company also provides a monthly email newsletter of tips and tricks.

ASSESSMENT

Overall, Marine ENC is ideally suited for people who use multiple platforms in multiple outdoor settings. It is fundamentally designed to be a cross-platform, cross-activity tool. You can move information from a PDA to a handheld GPS for hiking or to your boat's chartplotter for cruising–all using the same software package. This orientation is reflected in its capabilities to import and export data and help manage waypoints and routes across devices.

The flip side of this "Swiss Army knife" approach is that it may do too many things and contain too much data for many boaters. It is alluring to have topographic maps, hiking tracks, 3D views and street maps, but many boaters will only use a fraction of the data and features, and may become frustrated by the need to push aside unwanted menu choices and data.

However, for people who want the portability and extra data and options, Fugawi Marine ENC is about half the cost of many other chartingpackages. The best bet for marine applications may be to purchase the optional Navionics card. This avoids the data installation hassles and fuels Marine ENC with top-notch nautical charts and marine data.

Capt. Mark Doyle and Capt. Diana Doyle are authors of the Managing the Waterway cruising guide series, and their work has appeared in numerous publications. They also produce CDs and DVDs of NOAA and USACE charts.