[Pblais]

I don't use the AIS under Fuagwi but they have the best ENC display going save for a commercial product I saw for commercial ships. Most of the other packages really are quite poor at ENC. Scanning is pretty simple you scan the chart then input the Lat / Long coordinates for the corners. The trick is of course scanning a a large area at one time, but you can have it cheap or easy.

It does BSB well too but for ENC it is really great. You just load all the charts and it knows what to use and they all display seamlessly. Scale is not an issue.

Around here AIS isn't much use. The US Navy is pretty frank about when they are around and they throw you in jail before they hit you. The commercial boats are boxed into a narrow channel and are moving too fast to stop, slow down or hail you, but you know where they will be.

The last release added AIS and they maybe could do a better job of it. You still need a second serial port to use it. But they do add weather FAX overlay if you want it. You need to spend double to get more than you get with this product and in some ways you don't get that much more.

Pricey? At $200 Fugawi is half the major players price. For the high end RayMarine product you are talking a whole lot more than double. Persoanlly, I don't think the the Sea Clear product is worth free. You need to spend some money for charts at some point unless you remain in US waters all the time so in the overall scheme the price of software is peanuts. I also know of no single product that does the whole world well so you may need at least two software products to cover a world cruise electronically.

Just for the record you can't correct maps in PhotoShop, but you can think you can. A scanned map is a one off and less accurate. There are things you can't fix. It's does not mean it won't work. Magellan sailed with some pretty worthless maps. It's all how you deal with it. Information is always inaccurate in some way. You just learn to deal with it.