Navily makes stopovers easier in just a few taps

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In recent years, French startups have flourished in the world of recreational boating. Their common denominator is to use digital technology to implement an idea which intends to provide a unique service to boaters.. How many will survive ? Hard to say, but they all have the merit of dusting off dad's boating by addressing the younger generation of water sports enthusiasts.. Community sharing of information, co-location, « bla-bla-boat », so many responses to new attitudes in the practice of pleasure boating.

Among them, one particularly appealed to me, Deviated.

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Buy nautical charts on Geogarage

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Weather4D Routage & Navigation offers a choice of raster charts from many international hydrographic services . Charts folders are available for application on the French web server Geogarage. Charts are subject to an annual subscription by Publisher directly on Geogarage website after creating an account there. After subscribing to a publisher, the entry in Weather4D 2.0 credentials created in Geogarage activate display of subscribed folder , ready to download. Procedure step-by-step :

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Weather4D 2.0 revisits navigation on iPad [Update]

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Weather4D 2.0 is available sur Apple AppStore (*). After the success of the first two versions, APP4NAV company just revisit chart navigation on iPad and iPhone by integrating the timing dimension. With simulations and weather routing, navigation becomes predictive, allowing a constant anticipation of future weather conditions and sea state. This “navigation into the future”, relied on the quality of meteorological and oceanographic predictions today available, was designed in order to bring a new dimension to the safety of boaters. Read more …

AIS reception on the web [Update]

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In recent years, websites allowing the visualization of maritime traffic have developed on the web.. They continuously transmit via the internet the positions received from the ships' AIS transmitters, received by reception bases on land, all along the coasts. Two of them caught my attention because they present very different options : Marine Traffic et SiiTech. Read more …

Signal K Project, universal open source marine data sharing

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You will soon hear about Signal K, a marine data communication standard, developed in open source, which aims to replace NMEA standards (0183 and 2000) technically overwhelmed by the exponential development of connected objects. The designers intend to provide an open and free protocol to developers and manufacturers alike., allowing to get over the constraints linked to the NMEA : license costs, flow limits, limit the number and type of devices, unsuitability for complex environments, to wireless communications, therefore incompatible with the Internet of Things and the Internet itself.

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Does Navionics charting become dangerous [Update] ?

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Since the start of the navigation season, many boaters have found an increasing number of errors on Navionics charts, following recent updates, all media. All over Europe, Germany, Baltic States, French coasts of the Channel and until Spain, appeared non-existent channels and erroneous soundings, missing soundings, Missing information, Conflicting bathymetric information depending on zoom levels, and so on. Most importantly, these findings are made by long-time regular users of Navionics charting, experienced sailors.

[Corrective update 26 August 2015]
[October Corrigendum Update 2 2015] See end of entry. Read more …

AIS for dummies

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With the progressive generalization of the AIS (transceivers) aboard our pleasure boats (¹), and their obligatory presence on board a large proportion of commercial ships, capacities for display and processing of targets (surrounding vessels equipped with a transceiver) have significantly improved our security. Still need to know how to interpret this information that, in high-traffic areas, can quickly become a real headache.

In such a situation, better have a quick diagnosis of the risk of collision ! (Weather4D 2.0)

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iNavX undergoes a change of ownership

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New developers, new logo, new splash page, and new website.

The version 4.7.0 has just been delivered by NavX Studios LLC, the company that bought all of Richard Ray's computer creations : GPSNavX, MacENC and iNavX.

The handover took place during the summer. New developers (there are two of them) were first focused on iNavX, for a first debugging update, performance optimization and acceleration of charts downloading with X-Traverse. We can bet that this transfer will bring a new dynamic to these excellent applications, whose creation and development have rested since 2002 on the unique Rich Ray's keyboard.

I continue to test and produce the French version of these applications on behalf of the new team.

 

Météo-France GRIB files finally for free

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A year after my advocacy for free European data (¹) Météo-France finally offers free access to its two famous ARPEGE and AROME models. A welcome development, started in 2014 by the success of MyOcean, since then integrated into Mercator Ocean (²), but a notable change of attitude for a public establishment which has always been asked to self-finance a significant part of its budget. Forecasts from these two models are made available on Météo-France portal in the GRIB version 2 format. Since the 21 July 2015.

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