It seems that every time we look around, someone has introduced a new charting/navigation program for laptop computers. While they all do essentially the same tasks, each adds some new features, resulting in a different personality for each. In the February issue, we reviewed four such programs—The Cap’n First Mate, The Cap’n Voyager, MaxSea Navigator, and Nobeltec’s Visual Navigation Series. For this report, we’re adding another three: RayTech’s Navigator, Maptech’s Offshore Navigator, and Fugawi’s GPS Mapping Software.

In its earliest form, charting software consisted of simple programs that displayed and printed digitized charts—drastically simplified ones at the beginning and more detailed ones as computers with more memory and faster processors appeared.…