For anyone familiar with what’s happening in the digital chart world…I have some questions, looking for guidance.
My company is in a transition period from where we are switching from AVCS to the NGA ENCs. While we do so, I started looking at the NOAA ENCs. My question is, can I just download the NOAA ENCs and install the charts/updates without first deleting the old charts?
For example we are in San Diego. I already have San Diego charts installed. But I want to update them. Can I just download the NOAA San Diego ENCs and install them to update my current portfolio?
It’s a pain in the ass to go and look for what exact charts I want to update, if I can just download all the California NOAA charts for example and add them without first deleting the old ones.
Now, I’ve never done this before. I would make a backup of your charts and isolate the ECDIS from the slave before doing anything.
But I think it should recognize which ENC has newer information, and come up with a prompt asking if you’d like to do anything with the ENCs that are the same or older. You can chose to replace them or leave the AVCS be.
Worst case scenario, you end up with double the number of ENCs, in which case you can just delete the ones you downloaded from NOAA. I had this happen on a boat that was running TRS ENCs back in the day, the 2/M installed the NOAA ENCs and it kept jumping between them, and change is scary so we just deleted the NOAA ENCs.
You’re a lot more likely to find nerdy second mates on Reddit if you were to ask this question on r/Maritime. There are a lot of folks with experience on different manufactures of ECDIS’ over there.
What chart software are you using? I am going to guess Raytheon on a MSC conmar ship? I would certainly dive deep into the chart software manual to find out what is supposed to happen……
I am intimately familiar with Raytheon running AVCS. I may be the only person to physically meet up with the fleets favorite supplier of AVCS charts….twice😂. If you are actually running Raytheon I would talk to someone there or McKay or Radio Holland or whomever last serviced your ECDIS or completed your last radio annuals.
We are using Sperry Vision Master. We have a subscription service from a company called Geodesics. They provide AVCS charts and updates to us because we are limited in our internet and transfer capability.
I went ahead and installed the NOAA charts and it was pretty seamless. It auto deleted the old charts and updated the ones that needed updating.
So I guess I’m not exactly sure what we are getting from Geodesics. I was under the impression it was AVCS charts. Maybe I’m misunderstanding what AVCS really is in regards to a digital chart. I guess a US chart is a US chart?
All my charts are up to date after installing the NOAA charts so that’s good I suppose.
Jeff was our guy that sent us the weekly AVCS updates at Geodesicx. Unfortunately he was not a tech, just the contact for getting updates. I once saw the contact that was awarded to them from MSC. . Worldwide portfolios for the fleet:flushed:
AVCS takes info from all sorts of different hydrographic agencies across the world and updates their product. When you click any avcs chart there is info identifying who provided the data eith all sorts of other info as well.
. Worldwide portfolios for the fleet:flushed: