The availability of high-quality nautical charts in Europe is scandalous. Mariners are forced to pay through the nose for data that taxpayers have already paid their local HGO to collect, only for it to be punted to a cartel of corporations who package it in any number of incompatible proprietary and encrypted formats in order to fleece a captive market, and to promote vendor lock-in to their partner ECDIS system integrators.
The NOAA somehow manage to provide S-57 vector charts for the whole of North America for free - why can't the European HGOs man up and do the same. For an obvious cause like maritime safety, anything else is a disgrace.
As it is, it's actually far cheaper to bring up an Amazon EC2 farm to crack the S-63/Navionics/CMap chart encryption than it is to pay these conmen.
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Admiralty Charts
The availability of high-quality nautical charts in Europe is scandalous. Mariners are forced to pay through the nose for data that taxpayers have already paid their local HGO to collect, only for it to be punted to a cartel of corporations who package it in any number of incompatible proprietary and encrypted formats in order to fleece a captive market, and to promote vendor lock-in to their partner ECDIS system integrators.
The NOAA somehow manage to provide S-57 vector charts for the whole of North America for free - why can't the European HGOs man up and do the same. For an obvious cause like maritime safety, anything else is a disgrace.
As it is, it's actually far cheaper to bring up an Amazon EC2 farm to crack the S-63/Navionics/CMap chart encryption than it is to pay these conmen.