Monthly Archive: July 2016
NOAA introduces Zones of Confidence; mind your ZOC
Yikes! Did you know that some areas of the U.S. coastal chart you’re using may only show land and bottom features accurate in position to +/- 1,600 feet, and you shouldn’t be confident about the depth soundings either? NOAA has a new way to show boaters how old and inaccurate much of its survey data is, and it will surely give pause to those who pay attention. The concept is called Zones of Confidence and it’s slowly rolling out as diagrams on paper-style raster charts like the one above, but the ZOC accuracy info is coming much faster to NOAA’s ENC vector charts, and apparently it could be made easily accessible on the commercial vector charts you’re probably using.
Good instrument news: Garmin gWind Wireless 2 and Raymarine i70s
Mount the new Garmin gWind Wireless 2 transducer on your masthead, plug the GNX Wind display into your NMEA 2000 network and — badda bing, badda boom — your sailboat has quality networked wind data that hardly uses any power and retails for $900 bundled. And if you already have a Garmin GPSMAP 7400/7600 or 8400/8600 chartplotter series, you don’t even need the GNX Wind to display and network the data. Meanwhile Raymarine’s updated i70s all-in-one N2K instrument display looks great on several levels…