GL: Charts again

[Mike Curreri]

I am puzzled by the complaints concerning the availability of electronic
charts in general and the mechanism and costs of upgrades to Garmin charts
in particular.  I upgrade my charts automatically and free for my Coastal
explorer by a single click of one button.  The program goes out to all of
the preselected regions and checks to see if the charts that I have are the
most up to date.  For any that are not, it downloads them, loads them and
updates them automatically.  This is done for both raster and vector charts
and the program is set to select among them if there are two available based
on resolution.  I do my routing on the laptop, which is connected by 0183
and 2000 networks to two Garmin 5215 and single 5212 chart plotters, where
the routing is transferred, waypoints and all.   Very easy.

I also, just yesterday, downloaded the updates for the Garmin units.  I ran
the .exe program after saving it (download from the Garmin site was free of
charge).  The program created a file on an SD card which slips into any of
the Garmin units.  It automatically figured out which units were networked,
what versions of software and mapping were on each (including related units,
like the GMI 10 displays, radar and transducer controllers) and updated
wherever needed, giving a running commentary on the screen as to what
exactly it was doing.  It could not have been any easier.

Admittedly, these are new products (Coastal Explorer is the 2.0 version
recently out of beta; and the Garmin touch-screen units have not been out
more than a couple of years), but as noted before by others on the list,
charts are available from several sources on line for free and can be more
manually integrated on older systems as well.  Here are some of the sources:

http://www.nauticalcharts.noaa.gov/mcd/enc/download_agreement.htm

http://www.nauticalcharts.noaa.gov/mcd/raster/download_agreement.htm

http://chart.tec.army.mil/ChartServerV2.0/jsp/index.jsp

This stuff just keeps getting better all of the time.


Capt. Mike Curreri
USCG 100GT Masters, Near Coastal
Blue Grotto (Selene 5578)
Boat phone: 443.220.1090
Cell: 443.831.4138