![]() Better even than the NOAA, ENC in my opinion, but I’ll detail that in a future entry.Īs for Homeport, note how it’s able to profile the log’s collected depth soundings, even zoom in on individual points and pinpoint them on the charted track. But the log says different and actually comparing this chart to several others indicates that Garmin may have done the best job of representing the underlying NOAA data for this particular spot. In fact, though he took responsibility in the proper captain fashion, he kinda sorta thought the Garmin had misguided him about the “Obs rep” and the correct side to leave that bouy 68a. After running over the apparently sunken “crib” he’d had to limp the boat back to the ramp with a badly damaged lower unit and hadn’t investigated the track detail. ![]() I was with Anon when he first saw this track zoomed in on his plotter and then even better detailed on my big PC screen. Clicking once on that particular track point got Homeport to put that orange circle mark on the chart spot, clicking twice zoomed into the tragic image below. Methinks it was all that navigational focus at speed that largely accounts for what went wrong at track point #1,867, when Anon was within sight of the launch ramp and running a little bit further up river to burn the gas out his outboard. So Anon drove some 64 nm of complex river (the skinny Sasanoa is famous for its whirlpools!), and his Garmin tracked every bit of it in some detail, as you can see in the bottom middle window. Clicking on Active Log #16 would show the 25 nm he’d run down river before lunching in Bath. At any rate, I’ve clicked on Anon’s last automatically made Active Log (track) and Homeport has zoomed out to show part of a neat trip he took down and back up the Kennebec and Sasanoa Rivers from the launch ramp in Hallowell. Note that I’ve also opened the 5212 base map from the SD card you can see under Devices (I also have the Vision SD card in the PC, and can switch to that added cartography detail if desired). Thus all the data in the lower left window is his. At upper left on the screen you can see that I’ve opened the user file that we downloaded off his Garmin and that I imported into my Homeport Library. We’ll call him Anon so the Google won’t forever pin this very uncharacteristic mistake to his real name. Click to enlarge the screen above and I’ll explain after the break… But today’s look at some deeper Homeport features gets the benefit of a friend’s embarrassing navigation error. I stowed away some memorable tracks, quickly cleaned up some extraneous waypoints (careful with that track-to-route feature), polished some favorite routes, and then overwrote the user data on the 5212 with a much more useful set. I was able to easily copy the 5212’s embedded charts - plus the mess of tracks, routes, and waypoints I put on it last season - and then review/manage all on my home computer. They are pretty much alone in having this sort of user community the other GPS manufacturers haven't diversified the way Garmin have, so there isn't a big enough user base to support reverse-engineering the formats and creating software to reproduce it.I can’t imagine why anyone with a Garmin plotter, a Windows PC, and a bit of ability to use both wouldn’t find Garmin Homeport more than worth the $30 charge. I'm way out of touch with it now, and the software I used is no longer supported. As the area I created a chart for was at 68S, that meant we couldn't install the chart I'd spent weeks creating! As the instrument was installed in a commercially coded RIB customized for use in Antarctic waters, we couldn't just replace the plotter, either.īecause Garmin are widely used in many different sports, there's an active community out there modifying and creating maps for them. However, Garmin DID introduce a nasty trick that placed their equipment in chocolate teapot territory for us - you could only install a chart that lay within the area covered by the built-in low-resolution global map. For those creating maps (using non-Garmin code), you could ignore the security mechanisms as long as you didn't mind creating maps that could be installed on any device (which we didn't). Click to expand.It's nearly 10 years since I was creating maps for Garmin devices, but back then, the format itself changed very little but the security mechanisms did.
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