NOAA Nautical Charts on Your Desktop PC for FREE

by Haris

The NOAA nautical charts are created with our own tax dollars and are, therefore, public property.  The agency charged with the task of creating and maintaining the information on marine highways mandates that companies that commercially use the information created with public dollars provide a FREE way for the interested public to use that information as well.

First things first, though.  NOAA itself provides the easiest but limited access to all US nautical charts on the internet.  You can find the NOAA's On-Line Chart Viewer here.

 The Nautical Charts are grouped into 5 different regions.  Great Lakes group is obviously of particular interest to a Chicago paddler.  When you click on the link for Great Lakes, you’ll find a listing of multiple charts conveniently labeled with a system of 5 digit number that does not make any sense to a commoner.  If anybody knows of a rhyme or reason to that madness of numbers please let us all know.  I am sure it exists.  Fortunately, there is a Catalog link at the very top of the list for each region and it provides a visual reference to chart numbers. 

The Catalog shows the entire region with outlines for each chart as well as their numbers.  Finding the chart you want is not very hard once you zoom in.  Better yet, there is also an experimental website with the chart catalog superimposed on Google Maps.

This website allows one to quickly zoom in and out on the locations of interest, see available chart outlines and open them up in the on-line viewer.  Note the hyperlinks that appear on the right-hand panel once a chart is selected.  When you zoom in on the map outlines of the additional more detailed NOAA chart start to appear as well.

The view window in this on-line viewer is not very large but it shows every detail of the printed NOAA chart.  With broadband connection the speed of browsing is nearly instant.

Note the plus/minus zoom buttons.  Here's what a detail of the same chart looks like once fully zoomed in:

Unfortunately, the on-line chart viewer is limited.  The view window is only a fraction of the computer monitor screen.  There is no ready way to measure distances between two points or obtain exact coordinates of land or watermarks. 

Chicago paddler interested in these charts will quickly discover that the most appropriate nautical chart for us is #14926.  Conveniently, it is not available on the on-line viewer.  Chart #14926 is a multi-page booklet of charts that cover the entire coastline of Chicago area from Wisconsin to Michigan.  For some reason, it was deemed unsuitable for on-line display.

A desktop full-screen chart viewer will take a bit more work but has many advantages over the on-line viewer.  If you have a reasonably fast internet connection you can download the large graphics files, install free software on your computer, then you will have access to the most up-to-date NOAA nautical charts with a full-screen view capability, custom printing, as well as other bells and whistles depending on the software you choose.

NOAA provides two kinds of charts: raster and vector.  The first kind looks exactly like the printed paper chart you can buy or the chart you would see on the on-line viewer.  Vector charts are more abstract, contain most of the navigational information but are not as detailed with respect to other features on the map.  They take up a fraction of space that raster charts would occupy on your hard drive, the image quality does not degrade with zooming (in fact features come into and out of view at different magnification levels), and they are quicker to navigate on the computer.  Both kinds are tagged with GPS coordinates and allow for precise determination of position, direction, as well as distance measurements between route points.

Here's a view of Chicago River locks on the raster map as rendered by Maptech Chart Navigator:

Compare that with the vector chart screen shot from PolarView:

You can download either kinds of charts via a link on bottom-right of the experimental beta NOAA website or through the old-fashioned catalog of links.  You’ll find the hyperlinks for downloading the Raster Navigational Charts (RNC) and Electronic Navigational Charts (ENC) on the left-hand panel of the On-Line Viewer page.

I hope that the graphical interface is here to stay, though.  It is much easier to find your charts that way.  Presently it displays a large red sign “BETA!”  Beta means that the product has not been officially released and is currently in the late stages of usability testing.  Note tabs on top of the Google map that allow one to switch between RNC and ENC kinds of charts.

To view the downloaded charts you will need to download one of about half-a-dozen free software tools for raster and vector electronic maps.  HyperLinks to the providers of RNC viewers are at the bottom of the RNC download web page.  ENC providers can be found here. 

You will also need to unzip the downloaded nautical charts to somewhere on your hard drive as well as tell the programs where to look for maps.  Look for "Options" or "Chart Manager" somewhere in the pull-down menus of the program and it is not hard to find what to do and where to go from there.

I did not test-drive all of them nor did I test them in any detail.  Out of the couple that I tried, I chose Maptech Chart Navigator for viewing RNC charts and Polar View for ENC charts.  My primary criteria for choosing these were ease of use, aesthetics, and uncluttered interface.

NavPak-Pro was very intriguing since the same product can be used to view both kinds of maps.  It also has an extensive set of tools to … well to do something related to boat navigation.  For my purposes it was an overkill by a long shot and complicated beyond the short attention span of a contemporary consumer.  I also found that their choice of color-rendition did not agree with my taste.  Try for yourself and let us know what you think.

All of the products offered here for free have commercial counterparts.  One big difference between the free and $100-$200 versions of these software, I found, was live connectivity with GPS receivers.  One of the reasons I loved PolarView was the fact that it can export routes and waypoints you create as GPX files.  GPX is something my Garmin GPS unit can understand.  I like!

Hope this helps someone.

UPDATE: I was informed that the current version of PolarView software (0.7) permits the viewing of both raster and vector charts.  Now if only one could print with this elegant simple tool...