Many of the charts & tables found on this site are PDFs.

The Navionics Platinum card wows us with excellent cartography and an extensive photo library. The Garmin BlueChart is expensive and has no photo library. The C-Map card was prone to occasional inaccuracies during testing.

We tested four cartography cards. The Garmin BlueChart was loaded in the Garmin 3010C, which is the unit on the top of the console, all the way to port. The brand-new Navionics Platinum was run in the Raymarine E120 (middle). The C-Map NT+ Max was installed in the Standard Horizon CP-1000C, to starboard. Flush-mounted in the console is the Northstar 6000i networked system, which was used to test the Navionics Gold card.

Longtime PBR subscriber Bill Warden both praised a recent networked electronics article and asked about the differences between brands of modern-day chart cards. In addition to providing finely detailed charts for display on screen, today’s cards supply a plethora of additional information that mariners find extremely useful. Warden, in line for a full system upgrade, surmised that all chart cards on the market today have very similar features and prices. This led him to conclude that one should select a chartplotter first and then live with the card that it is capable of using. We’d have agreed with him a few years ago. Not today. The latest releases from C-Map…