New dutch ENCs with incredible detail

[MvN]

RWS finally started to take some serious steps into developing free ENCs. A sample of what to come can be found here:

ftp://www.risserver.nl/ENC/zeeland/

Currently only for 'Zeeland', but I can't wait for the 'Wadden' (very dynamic tidal area in the north of Holland)
Downside: the charts are so detailed that it takes OpenCPN ages to load and convert to SENC (even on a powerful FEA workstation). A tool to perform that task in the background would be great and probably the only way to use the charts, since you will hit something before OpenCPN is ready with the conversion. (yes, I posted a feature request)

Maarten

[Rik-lu]

amazing charts, I have been for years in Brouwershaven....

but for the speed its true , even my double processor, 8gb ram and solid-state-drive cannot help to make them fast enough in opencpn

[Zoef]

There may be a reason for the 2,5+ GHz quad processor and 8Gb ddr3 ram which are part of the recommended Tresco spec for ECDIS systems.

[MvN]

I have my OpenCPN running on an 8 core 16GB Win7 64bit workstation and even there it is terribly slow. I don't think this can be solved by brute force, at least not with current machines on the market

[nohal]

Nice charts indeed, much better than what they've been producing before...
They look pretty usable to me on a Core i7 notebook with 3 gigs of RAM once they are ingested, which of course took some time with -unit_test_1 command line switch while I was out for lunch.
You have to bear on mind, that the contents of the zips have NOT to be living besides each other, they are updates of the same set - if you don't overwrite the older versions of the cells with the new ones you will end up in sort of endless loop and OpenCPN will "never" have all the charts ingested, which will make it totally useless in this particular case.

Pavel

[sailorF54]

After several crashes (memory overflow) on a small 2GB Ram unit, I managed to get this chart set working by disabling quilting and opening one sub-area after the other and closing OCPN in between.
Once the SENC file has been created, things improve a bit, but panning is slooow...
Updating is a still a mystery for me...

Pretty ghastly at small scale, though

[MvN]

I didn't know of the switch option. It is an excellent was to force OpenCPN to build all the SENC charts and speed up the process. The slow panning is order of magnitudes faster than having to wait for the building of each chart and probably solved by choosing less detailed charts while planning.

RWS is still a bit mystical about if they will transfer all charts of Holland to this detail. They explain on the website that these charts are a special project, but also note that in the future 'all charts will be part of one policy/product'.

[FTG3]

Note that one layer up in the posted link you can find "Totaal" that gives ENC coverage to most of Holland.

[sailorF54]

Originally Posted by FTG3

Note that one layer up in the posted link you can find "Totaal" that gives ENC coverage to most of Holland.

Only waterways, as far I can see....

[FTG3]

The Totaal.zip file contains waterways and some but not all coastal areas. I am attaching a map of the Zeeland ENCs plus the Totaal ENCs.

Derick

[MvN]

True, but with one big and important limitation: there is no depth information and that is exactly what has been added in the Zeeland files with great detail.

Dutch sailing waters tend to be quite shallow and sometimes the recreational buoy marks are at 1,5m, sometimes at 1,2 or even at 1 meter, if there are any. On busy days the KNRM (non profit rescue organization) have boats standby at known areas, like Enkhuizerzand, to pull people or of the mud or sand, which will happen on a daily basis.

Navigation on dutch ENCs is not recommended, unless you follow the big commercial routes on rivers or canals.

[windekind]

New adres for Update ENC Nederland and Zeeland.
ENC - Fairway Information Services
Date 6/7/2012

[yachtman]

At the moment the updates seem to be a whole new chart, so delete the old one, if not everything slows to a crawl as some areas in zeeland are past update 12!, and all 12 will load! works well with a i7 win 7 computer.


the new address above has the last 2 weeks updates.

my recommendation is to look at the updates in a separate folder before a merge, incase the detail disappears, due to copyright (the wish to sell rather than give free) issues..

[P_Dub]

Is there a way to limit the number of soudings past a certai depth?
It seems to me that there is no need for that many soundings.
Bye