This shot shows the main panel with the chart of the English Channel. Moving the mouse around will display latitude and longitude where appropriate, and the names of any defined waypoints (black squares). Departure and destination points can be set with mouse clicks and show as a double red square and circle respectively.
This is the configuration panel where your preferences for importing and exporting data can be set. If you have a GPS receiver connected via a serial port then this can also be defined here. A list of waypoints for use as departure and destination points may be maintained here. These appear as black squares on the chart.
The setup panel is used to specify the departure date and time and the speed of the boat through the water. The departure and/or destination points can be imported from your configured software or GPS. They can be transposed to reverse a route.
Whenever the departure and destination positions and setup have been defined a plot button will appear...
Click the plot button to compute the best heading and show the predicted ground track.
The relative spacing of the track 'points' varies with the boat speed over the ground.
The colours of the points will be yellow during daylight hours or blue between local
sunset and sunrise. (Note: The points displayed are selected to give a representation
of the ground track -
Click the route button to display the details of the computed route. As well as the heading and ETA/ETE details a list of waypoints will be generated. This list can be expanded or reduced to a convenient number of entries and then saved, printed, exported to your chosen software or sent to your GPS. The Optimise function will find the starting time, within 6 hours of the current start time, that gives the fastest passage. The route will then be recalculated using this start time.
Screen shots
