Timezero Users

[crayiii]

I'm looking for info from sailors that have experience with Timezero Navigator.

We are full-time liveaboards sailors who are circumnavigating. Our navigation package on the boat is all B&G (Zeus MFD). We also have OpenCPN on a Windows tablet and Windows laptop.

We use OpenCPN for all of our planning and weather routing. We also use the tablet at the helm as a backup and for satellite images. While underway, the laptop is connected to a flat screen to display our position as well as wind, depth, speed, etc.

Although we can usually get OpenCPN to do what we need, it hasn't been very reliable. Purchased charts stop working, weather routing crashes, the entire app crashes, etc.

We are currently in an location where we can get okay internet and I've been chatting with the Timezero folks about making a switch. What I'm not able to find in my research is much in the way of real user experience.

Is it reliable?
How is the weather routing?
How are the charts?

Especially interested in input from anyone that has experience with both OpenCPN and Timezero.

[ranger58sb]

We have a barebones TimeZero installation with only an external GPS connected... old version now (2.0.something)... but we've been using it since around 2009, partly because it's essentially the same engine as our installed Furuno plotter. I've been very pleased with it.

Reliable: Yes.

Charts: Good. For us in North America, we have a choice of NOAA raster and vestor charts (we use both), plus C-Map and Navionics vector charts. Same charts for both plotter and TimeZero. Annual updates for NOAA charts; free download. No experience with the latter two brands on the plotter/laptop, but I've used C-Map charts on other plotters (previous boat) and on tablet app... and they seem good too.

(Satellite views are also available; that reminds me, we're about to enter an area where I hadn't yet pre-downloaded the relevant satellite file; think I'll do that today.)

Weather routing: No clue; don't have our own weather instruments on board nor do we have the available Sirius weather option.

No experience with OpenCPN, so can't compare. OTOH, I do see all their support requests, and I've gotten to the point where I don't feel like arguing with software to get it to work... so that's one reason why we haven't gone that route. Plus the Furuno/TimeZero pair was sort of a no-brainer in 2009. That's not to say TZ has been completely without fault, but their product support people have been very responsive... and IIRC two issues were about installation issues while updating versions. And then a third glitch was just because our main desktop computer literally died and I had no way to remove the TZ license, easy fix.

-Chris

[crayiii]

I bit the bullet and paid for TZ 4.0, the weather routing module, and several packs of charts. Installed it on both the tablet and the laptop.

It connected to the boats NMEA instruments as soon as I pointed it to the wifi, works amazingly well.

I know it isn't a fair comparison to a free software package but it isn't even close. The chart handling along makes it so much better.

Full integration with active captain is also nice.

It's very expensive and the charts are expensive as well. But worth it for us.