December 5, 2009 12:50
GPSNavX Wrote:Does TZ work with the native (updated and readily available and free to download) NOAA raster RNC's and vector ENC's? Or is one dependent on Maxsea providing the chart data? If the latter, then how often to they update their charts?Excellent question! And that gets at the meat of how they're able to get such incredible performance. The region data comes from them and you have to rely on them to release updated data. For me, having Furuno in there helps ease the discomfort of that. Furuno wants to obviously have updated charts as often as possible.
Having the chart data as a single downloadable file is really nice too. There's no messing around with loading individual charts. That's a real mess. Take iNavX as an example. It took me 4 blasted days to download each of those individual charts. Something really needs to be done about that - I consider it user-hostile and wrote about it in our article about the iPhone and navigation. I can't imagine going through that process again to download the charts - yikes! I'd much rather point to a single large file and grab it all and not have to mess around with anything else. There might be a lesson there Rich.