Also Sprach Short Wave Sportfishing :

I had a run in with their "technical support" a few years ago and I
vowed to never buy a Garmin product again - and I haven't. :)

Sorry to hear that. I've certainly had run-ins with various companies
over the years, and can understand not wanting to do business with them in
the future. I'm that way with Best Buy, the electronics store, after they
refused to honor an extended warranty on some crappy VCR.

That card deal is pretty much the same with all of them though. They
all have their proprietary software and somebody else's isn't good
enough. :)

The only ones that I know of which uses standard memory is the
Lowrance Ifinder, which takes cheap and easy to find SD cards. Of course,
marine charts are still rather spendy. I really wish one of the
manufacturers would start to support the ENC format that NOAA uses for
their free nautical charts. I've actually developed some software to
convert the NOAA ENCs for use on Garmin GPSes, but it's kind of labor
intensive and the results not quite as nice as the Bluecharts... but still
useable.

Dan

--
There are more love songs than anything else. If songs could
force you to do something we'd all love one another.

-- Frank Zappa.

On 13 Oct 2004 11:25:27 GMT, Marshall Banana wrote:

Also Sprach Short Wave Sportfishing :

~~ snippage ~~

That card deal is pretty much the same with all of them though. They
all have their proprietary software and somebody else's isn't good
enough. :)

The only ones that I know of which uses standard memory is the
Lowrance Ifinder, which takes cheap and easy to find SD cards. Of course,
marine charts are still rather spendy. I really wish one of the
manufacturers would start to support the ENC format that NOAA uses for
their free nautical charts. I've actually developed some software to
convert the NOAA ENCs for use on Garmin GPSes, but it's kind of labor
intensive and the results not quite as nice as the Bluecharts... but still
useable.

If they did that, they wouldn't make huge gobs of money. :)

I bet the guy who wrote the software would though. Wanna backer? :)

I have a Raymarine RC400 that has the Navionics XL3 charts - I like it
a lot. I bought it because the Navionics cart format can be used by a
number of different device makers.

All the best,

Tom
--------------

"What the hell's the deal with this newsgroup...
is there a computer terminal in the day room of
some looney bin somewhere?"

Bilgeman - circa 2004