MacGregorSailors.com

NOAA to End Printing Paper Nautical Charts

http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/news/weekl ... harts.html

Interesting, Spector, that time has arrived. I expect the Canadian Hydrographic Service will be following suit with their chart availability too.

Quote from the link...

NOAA announced a new product as well: full-scale PDF (Portable Digital Format) nautical charts, available for free download on a trial basis.

Ha ha! At first I thought they had actually developed a new format (oh no, yet another uneeded format to deal with..groan ), but we're safe, that's a typo in the article .

(It's Portable Document Format of course).

It seems inevitable in todays world.

An interesting commentary on ActiveCaptain on the subject

https://activecaptain.com/newsletters/2013-10-23.php

Following the FAA's lead:

http://www.aopa.org/News-and-Video/All- ... sales.aspx

I normally use and EFB (Electronic Flight Book). I't's on a Nexus 7 tablet and backed up on my Galaxy S3 phone. Same goes for my marine charts. GPS on the plane is via a Garmin 430w and on the boat, Garmin 441s. Works for me.

~Rich

Any specific questions anyone has on the NOAA charts? My wife is the deputy director of acquisition at NOAA and the charting used to be her project. I think she knows who to ask.

RobertB wrote:Any specific questions anyone has on the NOAA charts? My wife is the deputy director of acquisition at NOAA and the charting used to be her project. I think she knows who to ask.

NOAA Charts for Lake Tahoe ? Would these be available ? If so, how and who should I contact ???

RobertB wrote:Any specific questions anyone has on the NOAA charts? My wife is the deputy director of acquisition at NOAA and the charting used to be her project. I think she knows who to ask.

How long is the trial period for downloading? The SA site mentioned 3 mo.

Spector wrote:It seems inevitable in todays world.

An interesting commentary on ActiveCaptain on the subject

https://activecaptain.com/newsletters/2013-10-23.php

Its a pretty good piece IMHO. The fact that we wont update our paper charts due to cost means they are no longer of value even on failure of the electronic device.

The prudent mariner never relies on any one source of information for navigation.

I honestly question how it is people accidentally run aground, and that's as someone who has run aground three times.

I understand hitting a submerged wreck that isn't marked, but rocks are well marked. Even kelp beds are well marked. Every time I've ignored a chart AND my fathometer my depth alarm has gone off. Every Time I've had trouble it was because I made a conscious decision to ignore my instruments.

Now my procedure is to clear the alarm, pull up my boards, and then cross my fingers

It's not like the ocean floor really sneaks up on you.

Matt

It's not like the ocean floor really sneaks up on you.

As do lake bottoms...

The nail in the coffin for paper charts, as noted in the active captain editorial, is the tablet that downloads maps and has a GPS chip that shows exactly where you are. Cell phone towers are not needed. The power source for a tablet is independent of the boat battery, so makes for a better backup in the sense that electronic maps are easier to update.

Sent from my IPad,
Phil

by Phil M » Sun Oct 27, 2013 6:57 pm

The nail in the coffin for paper charts, as noted in the active captain editorial, is the tablet that downloads maps and has a GPS chip that shows exactly where you are. Cell phone towers are not needed. The power source for a tablet is independent of the boat battery, so makes for a better backup in the sense that electronic maps are easier to update.

I love technology, we have it all over our boat and use it a lot. An updated real time digital chart is much easier to work with compared to leaning over a paper chart trying to calculate the annual declination variance for that year of the chart, or writing updates on them from the latest notice to mariners.

One problem with technology is what Phil mentioned above; "GPS shows exactly where you are".

-From what I understand from some tech threads is this may not always be exactly the case with all consumer marine navigation software. The lat and long may be exact (to within a few feet) but where that data places the boat icon on the chartplotter may not be exact, depending how zoomed in you are, devices being used, nmea version, etc.

-Not saying that the "cocked hat" in my triangulation using my hand bearing compass taken in a pacific swell is going to be any better, but I know it is not exact and treat it that way.

I was on a different boat not that long ago that had state of the art technology with the radar laid over top the digital chart, and they did not match exactly. I am not talking about sea clutter error, but things you could hit - like bridges and rocks. Now one would hope those kinds of things would show exactly identical on both technologies; the Radar(line of site); and the Chartplotter (GPS satellite triangulation transferred to digital Mercator reproductions), and where the boat was in relationship to the bridge and rocks.

The computer in our outboard engine works all the time and I never give that technology a second thought, I think that consumer marine navigation technology is very close to being as reliably precise as my engine. Now call me an old fashion techhead, but I don't see us abandoning our paper charts any time soon, or being onboard and not looking up from the Chartplotter because I totally trust the plotter has me down on the chart perfectly ... and I am exactly six feet away from that rock awash.

I rely on technology a lot and for the most part trust it, especially at a distance, but when in close quarters ... it's always: 1/3 technology, 1/3 eyes, 1/3 ears.

The meaning of "Exact" in the case of the earth is imprecise.

Firstly, the charts we use are all rendered according to a reference ellipsoid (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reference_ellipsoid) which only approximates the "true" shape of the earth. Your radar, however, is showing the exact distance to objects from your tower and based on GPS. There's no simple way to completely eliminate the error of the ellipsoid used to render the chart on your chartplotter with the radar image overlay.

Secondly, the earth moves around quite a bit, with inches of error creeping in every year. If a chart is based on 40 year old data, the ground may literally be feet away from where it was when the chart was made, and that kind of error is big enough to show up as alignment issues on a chartplotter.

Thirdly, mistakes, rounding errors, inaccurate sightings, and older inaccurate data from before GPS all exist on charts and are very difficult to expunge. NOAA sends out updates on a near daily basis to charts, but most chartplotters are never updated.

So there's a certain amount of error we just live with and rely on our eyes and real-time instruments to compensate for. My charts show me where not to venture; my fathometer tells me when to stop.

I remember back in 1992 I was able to integrate a Navy GPS with an NMEA 0183 output to a PC (a 286 running Windows 3.1) and integrate "True Charts", a very early chartplotter app that used scanned NOAA charts, and then overlay the radar output of our SPS-67 radar by using a real-time video capture card in the computer. It was very high tech back then.

Never could get that bitch to completely line up.

Thanks for more clarification mastreb,
Sounds like we're ringing the same bell, technoligy is great - but it's not perfect (yet), so be aware.

On another note;
Has anyone confirmed that NOAA is actually "discontinuing making charts" or just "discontinuing printing them for sale"?

Maybe it will be like other paper products (books) and move towards only being available as an online download? We use Offshore Navigator Lite software on our home PC to create all our Passage Plans and before each extened trip I will print out a "Chart Package" that shows the cruising area of where we are going (large and small scale) including rum-lines, waypoints, bearings, my notes about tide-gates, etc.

There are a lot of things that will go away within our lifetimes. A lot of household knickknacks are already "printable" on 3D printers, and as those printers gain the capability to blend materials precisely and go down in cost, the market for "crap imported from china" is going to go away. It'll be a long time before you could print a smartphone, but coffee cups and binacle mounts are doable today.

Soon instead of buying these objects at a store, you'll pay to download a template and print it at your desk.

It's pretty easy to go to Kinkos and get charts printed on large-format printers, which is the way to go if you want to use paper. I keep paper charts aboard and have taught my children to navigate using them, but other than for learning purposes they are unused. With four idevices, a chartplotter, and the rarity with which I leave the sight of land, it's simply not necessary.