Electronic Charts

As everyone probably knows by now Maptech is offering free chart downloads.

The ENTIRE west coast, border to border, including all of Puget Sound, 279 NOAA charts, all scales, zoomable, fits in 550 megabytes. (Call me a glutton.) You *could* download a lot of charts and leave them compressed to save space until you need them.

My electronic chart setup at the nav station consists of:

- Mitsubishi Amity VP Color Tablet: $50 from eBay. This is an old Win95 "pen" computer. Stills runs SeaClear fine and I was also able to hook it up to 12 volts with no problem. No keyboard; everything is done with a mouse and could be done with the pen but I figure I'll loose that.

- Holux PCMCIA GPS card: $55 from eBay.

- SeaClear: free.

- Charts: free.

- WXTide: free. Perpetual tide/current table generator.

I also bought a PCMCIA 5gig hard drive (for $150 from eBay) to transfer charts and programs from my "good" laptop at home to the Amity on the boat. I also use it to backup the Amity.

SeaClear and WXTide are in the startup folder so when I turn on the computer everything eventually gets ready like a "real" stand-alone GPS unit.

Of course I have other navigation tools - two handheld, mapping GPS units, and real charts. (SeaClear can also print the electronic charts.) For under $200 though, the SeaClear setup is pretty hard to argue with. It's not resistant to dampness in any stretch of the imagination but I've been using the setup with older charts for over two years with no problem. Win95 is stable if you don't fool with it. Eventually the HD will crash or something will fail but when that happens I'll just use the other GPS units until I find another cheap laptop.