As this is an OpenCPN thread concerning the use of maps compatible with OpenCPN,your post is perhaps a bit mis-placed?
Otherwise I agree with you of course,I have hundreds of scanned and calibrated charts I can use in other nav.progs. including Brazil for my nearest waters. The entire coastline of Brazil being 3.400 nm I would never consider either buying at Eur 8.50 or indeed scanning hundreds of charts. All this is no news to the members of this forum who are using a number of sources to obtain their desired charts. Might be an idea to re-post your message on the MaxSea forum if there is one.
__________________ "And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by."
sae140..
As this is an OpenCPN thread concerning the use of maps compatible with OpenCPN,your post is perhaps a bit mis-placed?
I was replying to your suggestion to purchase charts from the source you cited within this thread, and I'm suggesting that raster charts extracted from Mapmedia mm1 charts could be made compatible with OpenCPN - although sadly not by myself, as I don't have the programming skills. I can only extract them into a standard graphics format.
I've just checked your chart source for their coverage of the UK, which runs to just 3 charts. The relevant MapMedia CDs contain 380 charts of UK waters in all scales.
Coverage of the Mediterranean is likewise restricted to just 3 charts (unless you're a subscriber - it does appear that larger folios are available at a much higher cost). So I really don't see your source as being a viable source of navigational charts - even if they are OpenCPN compatible.
But - I won't be pressing the matter any further within this thread.
I am very grateful for your suggested map source,please do not mis-understand me.
I have also the MaxSeasoftware with cm93 world-wide maps suitable for the creation of calibrated raster maps in many popular nav.progs. The source I suggested do not supply BSB charts as far as I know,only normal raster charts.
I have suggested here several times that OpenCPN also should have this calibration facility so we'll see what the future versions will include.
__________________ "And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by."
Not many people have visited this thread lately but for those interested, the Oasis of the Seas,the world's largest passenger ship,has just passed Bornholm on her way to Ft. Lauderdale after a stop in Southampton on the 2nd November.
__________________ "And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by."
Not many people have visited this thread lately but for those interested, the Oasis of the Seas,the world's largest passenger ship,has just passed Bornholm on her way to Ft. Lauderdale after a stop in Southampton on the 2nd November.
Continuing on her delivery voyage,the Oasis of the Seas passed under the Storebelt bridge in Denmark with only 50 cm clearance overhead at a 'daredevil' speed of 27 knots in order to increase the draught by 1.5 m.
I bet the captain had a long shower shortly thereafter.
If that was not enough,having rounded the Skagen lighthouse at 0500 UTC this morning,they are now heading into a full blown gale/storm in the North Sea.
See the GRIB report for 1800 UTC this afternoon.
They were scheduled to arrive Southampton around noon tomorrow.
__________________ "And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by."
Yea.. suppose this must be boring news for you over there in the Bay area..
Live GRIB reports will soon be an every day occurrence in the life of OpenCPN
so hold on to your southwester..
__________________ "And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by."
If you send a mail to shipreports@starpath.com with your position a mail with ship reports for the last 6 hours within a radius of 300 miles will be sent back to you.
Why not display this in OpenCPN??
A few lines of code converted the received mail into a gpx file, which I then imported into OpenCPN.
Below is the result for Latitude: 46.5 N Longitude: 15.5 W
at about 1000UTC. The format for each wpt is "Wind direction, wind speed , time UTC".
I think this could easily become a standard feature in OpenCPN, maybe using a different source than email. A nice reality check on gribfiles!
Here is a typical request sentence:
grib:36S,18S,59W,26W|0.5,0.5|12,24,36,48,60,72,84, 96,108,120
The GRIB file will be received within a couple of minutes. It is in binary form and can only be read by your preferred GRIB reader.
Interesting,and good for additional security checkups,but, I would far prefer to use the saildocs e-mail service for a more compehensive GRIB report which is saved on your HD and best accessible with the free ExpeditionLT with a built-in c-map interface. Dave could include a simple input panel as attached below in order to generate the maps co-ordinates. The e-mail request could either be incorporated in OpenCPN or dispatched separately.
Now I have a feeling Dave has a surprise for us,so perhaps we'd better hold on for a while to see what he conjures up...
__________________ "And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by."
Here is a way to display NDBC:s data from this page
in OpenCPN. I have attached a page created ~1115 UTC for "current hour". All ships world wide that has reported are displayed. If you choose a longer timespan, say 3 hours, there will be many reports for OpenCPN to load, but it's still OK and not to slow.
I have attached the ruby code below. It's a rar file. Strip the .doc of the end of the name. A gpx file will be produced. Use the "gpx in" button to import into OpenCPN.
Maybe you're using that, but if not: it's REST-style, and produces RSS XML, so you can get both ship and station data near any lat/lon and parse it consistently.
For about a year I've been thinking it'd be really useful to have this kind of thing integrated into a charting tool (ok, maybe some do already, but mine doesn't); it isn't that hard to do. But to do it in OpenCPN in a really integrated way, would obviously take some changes. I think the best way would be for OpenCPN to support some kind of simple plug-in API. Otherwise you're stuck getting out, creating a GPX file, getting back in, giving it to OpenCPN, etc, etc. It'd be reasonable if the first plug-in API just supported calling out and expecting back a .gpx (or nothing, for more independent plug-ins).
Yes I did see the rss feed and started programming.....but stopped when I realized that they dumped the precise wind direction in the station reports. Instead of a wind direction of, say, 259 they just reported W. In my opinion this isn't good enough to evaluate gribs and see what the isobars are up to.
Thomas, I see what you mean. It's weird: the rss feed for fixed stations at least sometimes shows the wind direction to 10deg or so, like: "Wind Direction: NNW (330°)". But the ship reports drop just about all the data. That's really too bad...I wonder why they do that?