Software for Navigation, Weather, Tides
See Communication and Weather Download software
I use Coastal Explorer from Rosepoint Navigation to do all these things. They have a 30 day free demo download if you want to try it for yourself on your next daysail or cruise.
Ease of Use
Love it, love it. Most intuitive navigation software I've used. And very robust. You can easily draw routes, add legs, figure out distances, mark events or locations - all just what you'd expect with drag and drop, right mouse clicks etc. The help is good as well and can be updated automatically when you're connected to the internet or used locally when you're offshore.
Chart detail with weather parameters:
wind speed (colored flags)and pressure
(contour lines) shown here
Charts
Uses vector and or raster and quilts them together nicely - or you can choose which type to show or hide. You can update easily from the NOAA site - which if you've tried to use the NOAA site you know can be confusing. CE also uses MapTech charts and later this year will also use Navionics charts.
GPS and AIS Interface
Coastal Explorer immediately recognized my GPS and AIS receiver - no problems at all. No having to figure out what serial port anything is on either - just plug and play! In fact I sometimes used CE's recognition capabilities to easily figure out which port numbers my devices were on - so I could type them into other products (such as AirMail which needs you to tell it what ports to look at).
AIS display is good. The ships appear as triangular blue objects pointed in direction of travel, with the ship's name and a trajectory if available. Clicking on the "ship" reveals the additional information such as destination and departure ports, mmsi call sign, time to closest approach (and distance at that time), current distance, etc. in a side data panel. You can set alerts for yourself as well. Of course AIS is only as good as your antenna. We share our with our mast-head VHF antenna by means of Smart Radio Antenna Splitter.
Navibe GM720 USB Mouse
Our wired GPS units are "older" to be kind. They came with the boat and work fine, but I don't have data cables even if such exist. So I chose to interface my laptop to a "GPS mouse" rather than one of the onboard GPSs. (It's called a mouse because it looks like one) This means I'm not pushing data back up to my GPS device - but why would I push data up to a 3" screen when my laptop has a 14" screen? The GPS mouse is a small, waterproof, display-less GPS receiver that connects to your laptop by USB. All it does is tell your laptop where the boat is. I found I had to find a way to get it outside the cabin, though, for good reception. Mine was made by Navibe - cost $35.
Note: Since modern laptops no longer use serial ports, and many boat electronics are serial port devices, I used a Keyspan USB 4-port serial adapter ($100-$125) to plug in up to four serial devices and output them to a single USB port. If you only have one or two devices you might choose to use a USB Serial Adaptor for each one ($30-$45 each) but then I'd suggest taking the devices to a USB hub so you don't use up more USB slots in your laptop than you need to. Inexpensive USB to Serial Adaptors do not seem to work well - Keyspan worked better for me than other brands.
Overview of West Coast with wind speed
(colored arrows) and pressure (contour lines)
Weather
CE displays weather files graphically over your charts if you wish. If you're connected to the internet you can download the data using CE. When you're aboard, with only your HF Radio, you can download grib files with Airmail or other product and open them in CE for graphical display. To do this use the Open folder symbol in the Graphical Weather Forecast bar and point to your downloaded file.
At right is the pressure and wind speed chart for the west coast - wave height, wave direction, wave period, humidity and temperature are also available - simply select the check boxes for the parameter you want to see or hide. Then you can step through the forecast by hours or days to see what is coming. At the top of this page, above, is a detailed view of the same weather chart.
Tide Level and Tidal Current
Tide Level and Tidal Currents can also be displayed by Coastal Explorer. The are displayed with arrows on your navigation chart and in a sine wave chart below the chart (see below). You can see where all the tidal current and tidal level stations are by turning them on with Format from the menu. If your scale is small enough, you'll see pale pink boxes and arrows. When you click on one of these it changes the station for which your tidal current/level chart is displayed. You can also see exactly where on the chart a tidal station is by clicking the bolded name in the Tidal Chart. For instance, in the chart below, clicking on "Tatoosh Island" displays a small map marker on the chart at Tatoosh Island station.
Guide book
Guide Book information is also available. This is particularly useful for planning trips ashore, but I've also used it to identify strange light patterns while approaching from offshore. You'll see pale brown-filled circles wherever the Guide book has an entry. Click on these to display the info below the chart.
Tide Level Prediction - Currents can also be displayed
Guide Book Display -
the brown circles indicate that
there is a guide book entry
for Victoria and for Port Angeles
