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NOAA RNC™ Raster Charts of the U.S. Coast & Inland Waterways
Fully Indexed And Logically Sorted By Geographic Area
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Own every NOAA RNC™ chart
of the U. S. Coast and Inland
Waterways for pennies each!
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FreeNavCharts is a Certified Distributor for NOAA Raster Navigational Charts, under jurisdiction of a NOAA program established to provide alternate distribution channels and value added services.
Our line of products were created to satisfy three primary needs:
- An efficient way to obtain an entire set of 2,160 RNC charts on DVD, avoiding time-consuming and frustrating downloads.
- Organization of the charts into logical and precise geographic areas, to enhnace efficiency of charting software.
- A means to rename chart files from standard numeric filenames to numeric/textual file names, simplifying chart identification and selection.
Our DVDs contain a complete collection of 2,160 NOAA RNC™ charts covering the U.S. Coastal Areas, the U.S. Great Lakes, Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands and U.S. Territories & Possessions. They include every RNC™ (Raster Navigational Chart) currently available from NOAA for these areas. While the identical charts can be obtained from NOAA's online chart servers, the FreeNavCharts collections provide features that are available nowhere else.
Our proprietary database and chart management routines allow us to give you the most efficient, complete and up-to-date chart collections available to the recreational boater, with organizational and indexing methods that will save you many of hours in use. Now, you can spend less time searching for charts and more time boating!
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Featured in Sail Magazine - May, 2006 |
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FreeNavCharts.com ChartMaster Collection™
(The difference between a "chart collection" and just a "bunch of charts")
In Our ChartMaster Collection, all charts are sorted into our exclusive organization
of 20 Geographic Areas, for ease of use and enhanced chart manangement.
Many customers came to us, after discovering they couldn't efficiently organize other collections.
Official NOAA® Raster Navigational Charts (RNCs™) |
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In the United States, all official nautical paper charts produced by NOAA's Office of Coast Survey (OCS) are available in raster format. A fundamental tool of marine navigation, NOAA's Raster Navigational Charts (NOAA RNCs™) are produced by scanning at high resolution the original color separates, which are used to print the paper charts. One of the advantages of RNCs is that they are identical in appearance to the associated paper chart, which makes digital charting a simple extension of conventional charting.
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Complete coverage of the U.S. Coasts, U.S. Great Lakes and U.S. Territories |
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NOAA surveys and charts the national and territorial waters of the U.S, including the U.S. Great Lakes, Alaska, Hawaii, Guam, The Aleutians, Puerto Rico and The U.S. Virgin Islands. In this process, they produce 1,016 traditional nautical charts covering 3.4 million square nautical miles. Conversion to digital format results in 2,160 unique charts and this collection includes all of them. (Some of the charts of the U.S. inland rivers were created from scans of U.S. Army Corps of Engineers charts and are not included in this collection.)
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Charts are fully geo-referenced for use in real-time navigation |
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After scanning the paper chart color separates, NOAA adds to the digital raster file such features as
- Name and general descriptive data
- Chart Datum, Scale, Projection, etc.
- Geo-Referencing (Lat/Lon coordinates)
When a computer-based navigation system is connected to a GPS, this geo-referencing enables the ECS software to locate and display the vessel's exact position on the chart image displayed on screen.
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Use any PC-based charting system compatible with NOAA RNC® charts |
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NOAA® RNC™ charts are created using NOAA RNC® specifications and will work with any ECS (Electronic Charting System) software compatible with the BS B-3 format.Raster Chart Display Systems (RCDS), one of the more common types of Electronic Charting Systems (ECS), use raster nautical charts and electronic positioning to provide an integrated navigational tool. RCDS's offer functionalities such as real-time positioning -- the ability to use the familiar chart image and show at an instant exactly where one's ship is in relation to its charted surroundings. Used with one of these packages and a GPS receiver, the charts support voyage planning and monitoring (routes, way points, off-track alarms, log books, voyage recording...), access to chart notes, access to large suites of charts on-line, bearing and distance calculations, subdued night colors, and much more. If you're new to electronic charting, look elsewhere on this site for a full list of compatible ECS applications to help you get started.
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Our ChartMaster Collection starts where others leave off |
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Most collections of these charts are no more than a disk full of data files (the charts) saved to disk in the exact same format they are received from NOAA. Typically, no attempt is made to implement any level of organization, simply because the vendor lacks the ability to do so.
- When downloaded from NOAA's chart server, there are 1,016 Master Charts. But, there are actually 2,160 unique charts burried within this infrastructure. Because NOAA only defines the primary chart name in its lists, most vendors don't even know what they have in their own collections, and they can only define the 1,016 primary chart names.
- Each of the 1,016 master chart folders, contain 1-78 unique charts, each with a unique name and each with a paper chart counterpart. Most vendors selling these collections simply copy all of the folders and charts to a disk, call them a collection and ship them out. But, that isn't really a collection... it's simply a bunch of charts thrown together. (In order to compete on a price basis, this is exactly what our Standard Collection includes.) To make an analogy, this would be like calling a bucket of change a "coin collection".
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Maximize your charting software's efficiency and preserve your sanity |
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Master chart numbers are not always sequential (consecutive numbers often contain charts thousands of miles apart). Lacking a logical grouping of charts, you have no choice but to load them all at once. This may not seem like a big deal at first glance. But, how does this affect your charting efficiency?
- Typically, the Open Chart menu option of your charting software will display 1,116 separate folders, each named simply by the master chart number: 11460, 11466, 11467, etc. Since consecutive numbers may or may indicated adjacent charts, you may need to open each of the 1,116 folders in order to read the names of the 2,160 enclosed charts. This assumes that you know and will recognize the exact chart name, when you see it!
- Unfortunately, chart names, like chart numbers, do not necessarily give any clue to the geographic coverage. If you happen to know the exact chart number and it's name, you can probably find it fairly quickly. But what about the rest of the 2,160 charts that you haven't committed to memory? This is like trying to locate the proverbial needle in a haystack.
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Our database, parsing routines, and chart management make the difference |
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Rather than simply selling mass copies of the same [non-]collections of charts that other vendors distribute, we've invested over 2,000 hours of programming time into creating a true collection of navigation charts... unlike any other currently available.
- Using proprietary database and chart management routines, we extract over 50 data values from each of the 2,160 chart files. Using the latitude, longitude, chart scale and various other values, our chart management programs then rearrange the file organization, moving charts into one of 20 geographic Chart Areas. Because this is an automatic process, there is no guesswork and very little overlap between areas. (An exception is small-scale planning charts, which may appear in multiple areas.)
- The geographic order of our proprietary Areas is much more logical than the Regional system used by the chart developer, as the Area numbers progress logically from West to East (left to right), and without gaps in the numbering sequence.
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Our ChartMaster Collection is only $95.00 (plus $5 S&H).
The ChartMaster Collection includes 2,160 NOAA charts saved to a DVD,
using the exclusive organization, sorted by 20 geographical FreeNavCharts Areas.
(If use several different charts, the organization in this collection is worth many times the price difference.)
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Raster Navigation Charts - RNC ChartMaster DVD: $95.00
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