Updating Navionics Charts

[Dockhead]

I cover a lot of miles and countries every year and need a lot of charts. It's expensive.

For most of the areas I cruise in I usually carry the following:

1. Navionics Gold charts kept up-to-the-minute up to date, as primary navigation in my main nav system.

2. Visit My Harbour raster charts, up to date, with OpenCPN, for those areas covered. These are fabulous, fabulous, fabulous, and inexpensive and unlike Navionics they are "Officially For Navigation". Unfortunately, they are only available for UK, France, Belgium, Netherlands waters so far. Used for planning on a big high rez monitor and at the nav table. For areas not covered by VMH, I have a good set of CM93 charts which are surprisingly good, although many years out of date.

3. Navionics charts with INavX on an IPlod for backup, bunkside anchor alarm, etc., not kept up to date.

4. Paper. Lately not kept up to date because of the sheer volume of work which would be required.


For my cruising area, I need three (!) Navionics cards for the main nav system, costing over $1000 to replace and $500 to update. I stretch my updating budget by starting a year of updates in April one year, then doing the last update April the next year, which means I have up to date charts for two years for the price of one.

One thing which really hacks me off is that one of these cards is "Entire Baltic Sea", but it excludes Denmark. Any have any recommendations for electronic cartography for Denmark which can be used in a Navico nav system?


And I'm trying to anticipate whether I'm going to have to throw away all there of my cartography cards this year and start over, since all the update contracts ("Freshest Data") are expired. Do they let you do it after a gap? Anyone know?

[Ribbit]

Visit My Harbour raster charts also cover the Iberian Peninsula now, round to the South of France (also Canary Islands and Azores). I just got the UK/Iberia ChartStick as I won't be headed round to the cold side.

Not sure if I have the following right re Navionics (I am going to get a small GPS Plotter with Navionics to have at the binnacle). I think Gold are gone, replaced by Plus?

As I understand it you can download whatever charts you need during the year of the first subscription. After you renew (at 50% of what I think is the startup $199?) you can do the same thing every year?

Have you got yourself stuck on an expensive Navionics package perhaps?

eta: Just checked with the web app:

http://webapp.navionics.com/?lang=en...crurIw_%7Ds%40

Looks like you can get Denmark with Navionics, but when you zoom right in, it shows there is a restriction due to Danish Geodata Agency which has to be paid for?

eta: That perhaps begs the question, are you paying for specific restricted charts access, that you don't necessarily use every year?

PS. I'm seriously thinking of getting an A3 inkjet printer for the boat, to knock my own paper charts out as I need them.