"Best" chart/navigation software

[requiem]

Originally Posted by sv_pelagia

"Almost as if their [OpenCP] fans have never used anything else."

To answer, I've used many:

...

If my guess is correct, all those are generally plotters for the leisure market, yes? While I'm not suggesting we need ECDIS, not addressing basic concepts like "knowing the source of my charts" is something that would be completely unthinkable on the, er, professional side of things.

In spite of terrible UX design, I think accidentally venturing into this space is what gives OpenCPN its appeal. Coastal Explorer, like SEAiq, is derived from a professional product, and thus includes much functionality from that space. I think Timezero also ranks well for similar reasons.

My perception is most leisure plotters are designed around the idea of a supplementary chart viewer (i.e. user is primarily passively engaged and consumes what they're given) rather that a primary navigational tool (i.e. user is more actively engaged with the software beyond simply dropping waypoints and zooming in/out).

OpenCPN doesn't need to have a steep learning curve; a comprehensive UI/UX overhaul could address most issues. The underlying functionality is there.

[hpeer]

As said above WHERE you are using it is important to know.

Remember this, there is cartographic data and there are data display applications. And they do not all play well together. And licensing rules change. For example that hit iNavEx hard. I was using NV charts but they changed their licensing and then they were no longer available in iNavEx.

IF you are using te ICW then Aquamaps is the hands down best. Using the Master features you get the best and most recent cartographic data available. There is also some guy who plots troublesome ICW routes and distributes them for use on AquaMap.

Other places, other solutions.

I like OpenCPN but I find it difficult to use, it needs too much investment in understanding geekspeak, and it is not entirely stable. Just had (more) issues with that this week.

[Ryban]

Navionics is good. The charts in the Caribbean and Panama were mostly spot-on, except for in a few spots in San Blas and Las Perlas where I used waypoints taken from the Bauhaus chart/guide book that everyone uses in that region.

That last point is actually a potential bonus in OpenCPN's favor, as you can get the Bauhaus charts as aligned digital overlays as part of your chart selection, which avoids having to manually enter waypoints into Navionics or other chart plotters.

It's also worth noting that the OpenCPN android app, though not free, is smoother and more stable, and easier to use, at least in my experience. You can have OpenCPN running on a dedicated computer below as well as on a tablet in the cockpit, both receiving the same data over your local network from all your instruments (AIS/GPS/Compass/Autopilot/Radar/etc). Navionics has some ability take in external data, like AIS, but it's more limited.

[Portage_bay]

For me in my recreational use it's OpenCPN. When I worked on the water for a living it was whatever my employer had installed. I use OpenCPN due to it's ability to run so many chart formats from different sources. Thank you to the OpenCPN and O-Charts teams. And because I run it on PC, Android phone and Android Tablet. I don't find it difficult to use. Any noteworthy difficulties I have are on the Android side and seem to be Android problems, not OpenCPN. Yes, it has a learning curve that for some can be steep. But well worth the effort for an exceptionally powerful package.

If someone doesn't want OpenCPN then I suggest for ease of setup and quick to learn it would be Rose Point's Coastal explorer. Best compatibility with Furuno would be Time Zero.

What I have used and base my opinion on:
OpenCPN
Coastal Explorer
Navionics.
All of the Nobeltec products going back to Navtrek97 before they became Nobeltec.
Max Sea which is the base for Time Zero
The CapN
Fugawi
Micro Mariner
SeaClear
Raymarine's products may be good, but I have no experience with their products.

There are others somewhere back in the dim recesses of my memory.

[JPK]

Thank you to everyone for the input. To touch briefly on some of the points and questions:

- Most of my sailing is in the SF bay. This is easy sailing from a navigation standpoint, as it's mostly line-of-sight piloting vs. true navigation. As I progress through the CPM and OPM courses, I'll venture "out the gate" along the CA coast. Mostly down to Monterey or up to Ft. Bragg. Then there's also the family vacation charters. We're going back to Greece again this summer and in the future will be hitting up other spots in the Med along with the Caribbean and French Polynesia (and I'm sure other places too.)

- I'm just now beginning to learn OpenCPN because it's what we'll be using in the CPM and OPM programs going forward. So, I have no real choice but to learn it, and in fairness, I may grow to like it as I get more familiar with it. My current opinion, as others, have also expressed, is that it has a lot of features in it. Some are intuitive, and some are not. The setup progress to get up and running is excruciating. So far I've invested hours trying to get a simple GPS receiver (the BU353S4 that many others have used) up and running. No luck so far. I wonder how many more hours I will have to spend to get it operational. In contrast, my new Logitech mouse showed up today, and I turned it on, went into BT settings and paired it, and it was up and running in less than 30 seconds.

Why do I bring up this comparison? In my mind, the whole user experience really comes down to "closed ecosystem" vs. "open ecosystem." In a closed ecosystem like what Apple so painstakingly curates, everything just works. You plug stuff in, turn it on and it's recognized and works straight away. The tradeoff is that if you don't like what's there, well that's just too bad. You get what you get. In an open ecosystem it's the wild west. Everyone has a better mousetrap and everyone wants to modify what's there, even if it's just for the sake of being different. If you don't like what's there, no problem. Tweak it or make your own. It might work or it might not. Good luck to you.

Those who have gone through the (seemingly exhausting) process of getting set up in OpenCPN and learning all its idiosyncracies will surely love how full-featured it is. Those, like me, who just want a good navigation tool without having to get a degree in CS and figuring out what the right driver and baud rate and terminal code and whatnot to get the damn GPS dongle to work... well, not loving it so much at the moment. OK, sorry... rant over.

So what am I looking for? Something that "just works" in the places I plan to sail, has good vector (and ideally raster) charts for those areas, can navigate in deg. true and magnetic, and can run on an iPad and ideally also on a Mac. There's probably more that I want, but those are the top level bullet points.

[nohal]

JPK...

I have been reading this thread with utmost interest. Being an OpenCPN developer and a Mac user myself I can probably have some input you might find useful.

Making USB GPS devices work with macOS is a real pain. The reason for that is the poor support of the USB chipsets in macOS, accompanied by Apple's (understandable) security requirements making third party drivers pretty much impossible to create. This basically means that unless your device uses one of the few chips supported, like FTDI, you are condemned to suffer.
This has absolutely nothing to do with OpenCPN or any application software whatsoever.
If you are looking for the usual "smooth" experience, BU353 is a really terrible choice. Being an obsolete design using a very old GNSS chipset it actually is a terrible choice for any platform nowadays, but more so for a Mac.
There are devices that claim to offer support for macOS that is as close to what you talk about as flawless as reasonably possible, like the BadElf, but honestly, seeing the price tag it would never come to my mind to buy one.

If you want to know what I use personally when I really must plug something somewhere with a USB cable, it is a u-blox 8 GNSS sensor from a drone controller connected through TTL-to USB adapter with FTDI chipset. As far as I can tell, it is a plug-and-play experience on any platform including macOS for mere 20 bucks. The last time it was actually used on a boat is several years ago though.

The reason for that is the wi-fi/ethernet gateways to NMEA0183/NMEA2000/Seatalk/whatever boat networks are nowadays accessible and routinely already present on boats and if not, pretty much any cellphone in your pocket can provide position data over network, rendering the USB GPS puck a thing of the past and last of the backup solutions ever used.

I would also like to ask for a favor, not just to you, but to the other good folks expressing their frustration with OpenCPN in this thread. We really look for your feedback describing what exactly are "the simple tasks that are hard to accomplish in OpenCPN".

Thanks

Pavel

[mvweebles]

Originally Posted by nohal

I would also like to ask for a favor, not just to you, but to the other good folks expressing their frustration with OpenCPN in this thread. We really look for your feedback describing what exactly are "the simple tasks that are hard to accomplish in OpenCPN".

Thanks

Pavel

1. Opening a chart. Wait, loading a chart. Wait... Knowing what chart to load. Where to find it. Where to store it. OMG - just take a new user and put a camera on him and watch.

2. Plugins. What are they? Where are they? Why do I need a gazillion page manual to figure out how to load a chart?

3. Okay. So I figured out how to open a chart on my PC. Why do I have to figure it out all over again on my Android device?

4. Gateway device. How do I get data from my shipboard system into OpenCPN? I bought a NEMO device from Rosepoint and it auto-configed in 2-seconds with Coastal Explorer. With OpenCPN, I pinged the CF bigger brain and got a goose egg. Rosepoint gave me some tips but the 0183 interface is lame compared to N2K NEMO is capable of .

If the developers are really curious, pitch-in and buy a copy of Coastal Explorer and put a camera on a newbie using that and watch how it works out compare to the newbie on OpenCPN.

[wholybee]

I seldom cite "free" or "opensource" as advantages to OpenCPN. OpenCPN has a lot more features than other software. Common tasks are much faster on OpenCPN than other software. Creating routes, editing routes. Drawing lines on charts for reference. Measuring distance. Estimating time of arrival. Changing chart detail and what data is displayed. There is a learning curve, but it works really well and you can navigate the software faster than other software I have tried.

The graphical display and notification of CPA with AIS targets is the best I have seen, and really a huge reason alone why to use OpenCPN.

OpenCPN has a HUGE selection of charts. Most other software locks you into charts from only one source. With OpenCPN I can have CMAP, Navionics, O-Charts, Official NOAA charts, and satellite imagery, and switch between them instantly with a single keypress.

GPS dongles are a hack IMHO. Popular because they are cheap and thus well matched to free software. And more difficult on a Mac than on a PC. But if you were to interface OpenCPN to your boat via wifi, the setup and getting it to work would be easier.

Some stuff is funky and difficult. I spent a lot of time with Weather Routing and got good at it, but still found Predicting so much better that is what I used. Chart management can be a steep learning curve, but that is solely because of the flexibility and how different various chart files actually are.

[JPK]

Hi Pavel,

Thanks for the reply. I really do appreciate it.

Regarding the GPS receiver, this is currently top of mind for me so I'll share a couple more thoughts. First of all, I'm not exaggerating when I say I spent probably 10 hours researching which GPS receiver to buy to use with OpenCPN on my Macbook. I shouldn't have to do this. As I'm sure you know, there's a list of GPS devices on the OpenCPN website here, which looks to be horribly out of date is not helpful at all. I ended up choosing the BU353S4 because it seemed to be the device that came up most often in conversations on this forum when it came to GPS receivers on MacBooks. If the OpenCPN document stated what you just stated here, that would have saved me $115 and a lot of frustration. I thought that what I was buying was a "known good solution" that others have been able to make work for them. I don't think it's unreasonable to ask for a document that's kept up to date that lists compatible devices that work with the current version of a particular OS (in this case MacOS Sonoma).

I realize that I'm a bit of an edge case in this regard, but because I don't own my own boat and I sail exclusively on boats from our club's charter fleet or on boats that I charter on vacation, relying on streaming data from the boat's systems is not a reliable plan. I need to have a self-sufficient navigation solution when I step aboard a boat, even if it's just a backup to the boat's built-in chart plotter. Hence the need for a GPS receiver. Yes, the Bad Elf is crazy-expensive at nearly $500, but by the time I factor in the $115 I just wasted on the BU353, and the hours I've just spent trying to get it to work, suddenly $500 for a reliable solution starts to sound not so bad.

I do appreciate you reaching out and asking for input and I apologize again for the rant. I will say that if you are really interested in getting feedback from the perspective of new users, there's a lot of opportunity for that coming up. The club/school that I belong to is the largest US Sailing school on the west coast and is now switching it curriculum from paper charts to electronic navigation. THere are three new nav courses that they are preparing to offer. Nav1 will be taught in Navionics, while Nav2 and possibly Nav3 will be taught in OpenCPN. There are soon to be entire classrooms full of people who are about to be exposed to OpenCPN for the first time, and will need to get their heads around it in short order to progress through the CPM and OPM programs. If you are interested, I can put you in touch with the director of education for the club.

[wholybee]

Originally Posted by nohal

<snip>

I would also like to ask for a favor, not just to you, but to the other good folks expressing their frustration with OpenCPN in this thread. We really look for your feedback describing what exactly are "the simple tasks that are hard to accomplish in OpenCPN".

Thanks

Pavel

I have a solid knowledge of OCPN and also advanced PC skills, so I don't have a problem with OCPN as it is. But I also support other users and see what they go through.

Wizards. A "Get Connected" Wizard where a user answers a few basic questions. Do you have GPS? How is it connected? Do you have a NMEA gateway device? Brand? How is it connected? The Wizard would then perform some tests and create the connection.

A similar Wizard for setting up charts. It could create a chart directory. Ask the user what type of charts they have/want, and copy them to the chart directory, or add the sources to the chart downloader, or assist the user with O-Charts. An interface to purchase charts from o-charts without ever leaving OpenCPN would be helpful.

The chart wizard would be tricky. But I think a connection wizard could be fairly straight forward.

Once that is done, a "welcome tour" with pop-ups that point to and describe a few basic tools and displays. Something as simple as knowing the hamburger menu is there; it is surprisingly common to run into a user that never realized they can click that. Walk them through creating and activating their first route, creating waypoints, etc.

[nohal]

Originally Posted by mvweebles

1. Opening a chart. Wait, loading a chart. Wait... Knowing what chart to load. Where to find it. Where to store it. OMG - just take a new user and put a camera on him and watch.

2. Plugins. What are they? Where are they? Why do I need a gazillion page manual to figure out how to load a chart?

3. Okay. So I figured out how to open a chart on my PC. Why do I have to figure it out all over again on my Android device?

4. Gateway device. How do I get data from my shipboard system into OpenCPN? I bought a NEMO device from Rosepoint and it auto-configed in 2-seconds with Coastal Explorer. With OpenCPN, I pinged the CF bigger brain and got a goose egg. Rosepoint gave me some tips but the 0183 interface is lame compared to N2K NEMO is capable of .

If the developers are really curious, pitch-in and buy a copy of Coastal Explorer and put a camera on a newbie using that and watch how it works out compare to the newbie on OpenCPN.

1. OpenCPN is not limited to a single type and source of charts, charts freely available are downloadable directly, stored and configured for you from the application. Can you please be more specific in what on the process sucks exactly? Of course obtaining a managing charts externally involves some work, can you try to describe a process that would not while achieving the same result in your opinion? How does Coastal Explorer make using the charts from other independent sources not being known to Rosepoint easier?

2. Plugins extend the functionality of the program with additional features you might or might not want or use and are developed by independent 3rd parties, they are installed directly from the application, there is no need to look for them anywhere else and they are not required unless you want to use what they provide. What in your opinion would make this easier and can I find the same extensibility in Coastal Explorer done better?

3. I do not understand this point, the process of chart installation is exactly the same on Android. What would you expect to be happening? Having the configuration synchronized between your computer and the Android device? Or something different?

4. OpenCPN is not limited to a single gateway device with fixed behavior, which requires you to set up the protocol it uses, address and port. That is all. OpenCPN also supports NMEA2000 directly now. How exactly does Coastal Explorer make connection to gateways from other independent vendors easier to configure?

I concur that OpenCPN lacks a decent manual for first time users and that the broad options available in combination with being agnostic to which one the user selects pose an introductory hurdle, that is a fact.

[wholybee]

Originally Posted by nohal

3. I do not understand this point, the process of chart installation is exactly the same on Android. What would you expect to be happening? Having the configuration synchronized between your computer and the Android device? Or something different?

Particularly on a phone, the options dialog doesn't fit. So it sometimes requires switching back and forth between portrait and landscape and scrolling the screen to see everything. Buttons on the right side of the dialog are not visible, and if you didn't know they were there and to scroll, you would be very confused. (IIRC, the button to add chart sources is hidden) On android, there is an additional android specific menu that is correctly formatted, but not all options are in that dialog so you need to revert to the poorly formatted dialog.

I recommend android users install on a PC first, learn the process, then once they know what to do, it is easier to navigate and find everything on the Android. Maybe even go as far as open the dialog on both at the same time.

[nohal]

Originally Posted by wholybee

Particularly on a phone, the options dialog doesn't fit. So it sometimes requires switching back and forth between portrait and landscape and scrolling the screen to see everything. Buttons on the right side of the dialog are not visible, and if you didn't know they were there and to scroll, you would be very confused. (IIRC, the button to add chart sources is hidden) On android, there is an additional android specific menu that is correctly formatted, but not all options are in that dialog so you need to revert to the poorly formatted dialog.

I recommend android users install on a PC first, learn the process, then once they know what to do, it is easier to navigate and find everything on the Android. Maybe even go as far as open the dialog on both at the same time.

Thanks, this is exactly the feedback we are looking for outlining the problem in a way that can be understood and addressed.

[nohal]

Originally Posted by JPK

Hi Pavel,

Thanks for the reply. I really do appreciate it.

Regarding the GPS receiver, this is currently top of mind for me so I'll share a couple more thoughts. First of all, I'm not exaggerating when I say I spent probably 10 hours researching which GPS receiver to buy to use with OpenCPN on my Macbook. I shouldn't have to do this. As I'm sure you know, there's a list of GPS devices on the OpenCPN website here, which looks to be horribly out of date is not helpful at all. I ended up choosing the BU353S4 because it seemed to be the device that came up most often in conversations on this forum when it came to GPS receivers on MacBooks. If the OpenCPN document stated what you just stated here, that would have saved me $115 and a lot of frustration. I thought that what I was buying was a "known good solution" that others have been able to make work for them. I don't think it's unreasonable to ask for a document that's kept up to date that lists compatible devices that work with the current version of a particular OS (in this case MacOS Sonoma).

I realize that I'm a bit of an edge case in this regard, but because I don't own my own boat and I sail exclusively on boats from our club's charter fleet or on boats that I charter on vacation, relying on streaming data from the boat's systems is not a reliable plan. I need to have a self-sufficient navigation solution when I step aboard a boat, even if it's just a backup to the boat's built-in chart plotter. Hence the need for a GPS receiver. Yes, the Bad Elf is crazy-expensive at nearly $500, but by the time I factor in the $115 I just wasted on the BU353, and the hours I've just spent trying to get it to work, suddenly $500 for a reliable solution starts to sound not so bad.

I do appreciate you reaching out and asking for input and I apologize again for the rant. I will say that if you are really interested in getting feedback from the perspective of new users, there's a lot of opportunity for that coming up. The club/school that I belong to is the largest US Sailing school on the west coast and is now switching it curriculum from paper charts to electronic navigation. THere are three new nav courses that they are preparing to offer. Nav1 will be taught in Navionics, while Nav2 and possibly Nav3 will be taught in OpenCPN. There are soon to be entire classrooms full of people who are about to be exposed to OpenCPN for the first time, and will need to get their heads around it in short order to progress through the CPM and OPM programs. If you are interested, I can put you in touch with the director of education for the club.

The documentation is community maintained, it is not reasonably possible for me or any other developers, who all develop OpenCPN for free, to keep buying new hardware as it becomes available and test compatibility of new versions of operating systems. Unfortunately with Apple Silicon and recent versions of macOS the situation on this platform got even worse than the bad it already was and it will take the Internet time to reflect it. If there is anybody to be asked for an up to date list of compatible peripherals, it unfortunately is Apple, who don't give a damn about it.

We are of course interested in feedback from important userbase like you describe and they are welcome to get in touch either in the support forum or the issue tracker and developer discussion on Github, the user input is the principal thing that drives OpenCPN development, but that input has to be provided to be taken into account and we simply can't be everywhere...

[Don C L]

I like this one for my iPhone:
https://www.isailgps.com/

I have Navionics, and tried it, but I like this one better.

You don't need a GPS receiver if the iPad or iPhone have it, which all the recent ones do, to download charts and make routes and waypoints. Other functions need cell service, but I never use those anyway: https://www.isailgps.com/compatibility.html