"Matt O'Toole" wrote in message
news

I haven't tried Fugawi, but I'd like to. I'm convinced vector charts are
the way to go.

Matt O

And I am convinced that raster charts are the way to go and that, perhaps, I
am not in the mainstream and have made it to the position of 'old-fart'. I
am in the process of looking at some current generation chart plotters to go
on a new boat. I haven't paid much attention to marine electronics in the
past 6 or 7 years since I outfitted my last boat. It has surprised my that
every non-pc based chart plotter out there is vector based --- no one has
done one to support raster.

I have been using paper charts for nearly 55 years. My last 2 boats had PC
based systems (Maptech and/or Cap'n). I found that having chart images on
my screen that looked exactly like the charts on my nav table was a BIG
plus.

It has been my experience that vector charts have less information on them
than raster charts. While some see this as an advantage I do not: one mans
clutter is another mans important data. Most of the vector charts that I
have looked at do not show light characteristics: you need to point to it
to get a pop up. That makes absolutely no sense to me. Having to manage my
vessel and putz around with a pointing device trying to find the light with
a 6 second flash is somewhere between dumb and dangerous. Raster charts
have all the information right there with no screwing around. Vector
technology salesmen take great pride in their products' ability to remove
layers of information to 'unclutter' the screen. When they demo this
feature, all I see being removed is information I deem important. My
understanding of the vector chart manufacturing process is that they all
start out with the raster charts. So they do not have any more accurate or
timely information. In fact the process of going from one format to the
other has been known to introduce errors.

Let me say at this point that I am a retired geek. I have spent most of my
life playing around with the then current technologies. I still consider my
self to be pretty much of a geek. So I am not afraid of something new. I
had great hope for vector charting. but IMHO, that promise has yet to be
fulfilled. The biggest failure of this technology is in not being able to
provide timely updates. With digital, it should be a simple matter to push
out weekly (daily ??) NTM updates via the internet. This is something I had
been able to do with the MapTech Pro service . Each week I would get NTM
updates to 100% of my charts. Now, you can download them yourself for free.
Not with vector charts.

So, less information, less accurate information, less usable information,
what am I missing? Am I really getting that far out of touch?