ECDIS is the default now with the main two choices being TRANSAS and Furuno. Personally I am more familiar with Furuno. IRT W4W, despite being a old program is still my go to planning tool bar none. A seperate printout of wayoints, the auxiliary features of printing out the waypoints to intersect lat or long with exact positions as a double check on ECDIS or if using both ECDIS and paper as I was forced to do on the ship I sailed on over 9 years as a MSC CO-CO was required to have both is invaluable. Using W4W features to rapidly find the best limiting latitude in composite GC sailings is fast and efficient. By the way, what ever happened to the genius who developed W4W. Almost became an urban legend. Tried contacting him years ago, always an excuse, that he was offshore but would soon be back and update the program to run on new program versions besdides XP. No one ever heard back. Some ships bought old XP laptops from ebay just to run the W4W.
I’ve used a program called Spica that is really excellent. Populates everything you need from pubs and physical charts to purchase if you have a Capt that’s big on paper as well as a more palatable “check” feature than the ECDIS’ own system. Will do weather routing/overlay if you want. Done on a desktop and then plug into your ECDIS and pretty seamless upload.
Worst program I’ve used is easily Navios Platinum. Garbage ECDIS that makes even updating charts a nightmare. Fortunately there’s only a couple ships in the fleet using it still. I was praying everyday the whole system would shit the bed so they’d have to get a new one.
Nice stuff.
Sounds like something I need to check on. We used “One Ocean”, a complicated Rube Goldberg procedure which involved multiple downloads, uploads, selective actions to simply make weekly and monthly corrections. Burned up hours of personal debited phone time trying to get a standard procedure. Every tech I spoke to had a different take, shortcut or simply had no idea what I asked. Some were in London, India, Benladesh and who knows where with arcane hours, background racket. Once called the tech in India, he was having his home remodeled and the noise from the construction made it impossible to understand. I wasn’t the sharpest digital knife in the drawer, but the ridiculous and random update procedures had me pulling my hair out. Just when I had it figured out and had hard procedure document printed, the whole procedure changed again when they were bought out or implemented a different management team.
Someone replied to your post.
| BeerCaptain
March 15 |
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I’ve used a program called Spica that is really excellent. Populates everything you need from pubs and physical charts to purchase if you have a Capt that’s big on paper as well as a more palatable “check” feature than the ECDIS’ own system. Will do weather routing/overlay if you want. Done on a desktop and then plug into your ECDIS and pretty seamless upload.
Worst program I’ve used is easily Navios Platinum. Garbage ECDIS that makes even updating charts a nightmare. Fortunately there’s only a couple ships in the fleet using it still. I was praying everyday the whole system would shit the bed so they’d have to get a new one.