[JohnDProctor]

John

Am I correct in assuming that you are referring to the quality of "chart" data which is displayed by GPS NavX and others?

....snip...

Surely it would be better if UKHO and other chart sources produced electronic versions of their products which could be updated as required online for a reasonable annual fee. Thus the data would be as accurate as possible and could be read using ones preferred software.

Perhaps the problem is not with the readers but with the data sources.

Roger,

You are partially correct. The problem lies with both the data sources and the software vendors. By this I mean that the software vendors will by nature attack the easy markets of North America. After all free charting data is hard to beat. But that does not get a solution to the rest of us. Here in Australia the data is supplied only to licensed software vendors with a hardware dongle. God knows how much the license fees are but clearly the Hydrographic Office is setting its product pricing based upon commercial users. Without the software vendors putting the case for the recreational mariner I'm afraid that 'officially maintained' data will be outside the realm of the recreational mariner. S57 will not change this one bit.

The recreational mariner has an alternative source for 'unofficial maintained' data and that is through the likes of C-Map and Navonics. These products are targetted at the recreational mariner and provide additional information which is of interest to him. However, neither of these vendors has ventured into the Mac software marketplace yet and in my opinion are unlikely to do this in the future.

I will not invest in electronic technology which is no better than my existing paper charts (i.e. manual updates by me). For me to invest in an electronic solution I believe that I should expect updated data to be available either on an individual update or subscription basis. After all would you buy software knowing it will never be updated?

With the way the MacOS X86 is moving and some colateral technologies (CodeWeavers CrossOver product http://www.codeweavers.com/ ) I may just get what I want by running PC based software on OS X86. While this may seem contrary to what us Mac folks have done over the years as this seems to reward a company which has not made an investment in the Mac platform. However, they do have a solution where the Mac software vendors do not.