T&T: Nobeltec Max Pro

[Scott E. Bulger]

Milt,

 

I was a diehard Nobeltec fan/user for 4 years.  I even bought their first
generation radar and then paid more money to upgrade to their second
generation radar.  I believe in having PC based navigation alongside a unit
like a Furuno or a Garmin, for redundancy, disparate code base yielding the
same location information and improved planning functionality.  After a year
of struggling with the decision I abandoned VNS and switched to Rosepoint
Navigations Coastal Explorer.  I have been very happy with CE and used it
for about 1,500 hours in the last year.  During that time there have been
two, maybe three lockups requiring a restart of the program, not the windows
operating system.  I've met a few of the guys there and they seem to be
committed to the product, which was one of my concerns.  The big bucks is
really in the charts anyway, and if you've switched to CMAP they will work
with CE.  

 

I think the biggest difference between VNS (call it whatever you want,
unless they rewrote the whole product it's still VNS) and CE is the way the
code has been developed.  Brad (the software architect at Rosepoint) had the
benefit of seeing all the features that evolved over time in VNS.  Therefore
he could develop the product from the ground up knowing what the features
needed to be and do.  VNS has had more people working on the code, so there
are parts of it that just don't work and cause the rest of it problems.  An
example is the Console view.  For years I asked them to fix a bug where the
console would disappear, requiring you to restore the default console view
and re-customize it.  They finally said it was unlikely the bug would ever
get fixed because it was such a low priority.  

 

One of the disadvantages of CE is that it's taken Rosepoint a while to come
out with some of the features they have been talking about for some time.  I
think this is a case of being overly optimistic on product development time.
It's hard not to promise features, but your better off setting expectations
you can beat rather than disappoint.  

 

In summary, if you want a robust, reliable, simple PC based navigation
program, I don't think you can go wrong with CE from Rosepoint.  

 

Scott Bulger, Alanui, N40II, Seattle WA