Garmin BlueChart question....

C

Casey

New member
This question is being brought to you from beautiful "downtown" Echo Bay, BC - about 30 airmiles ESE of Port McNeill (believe it or not there is even a WiFi connection accessible...).

Garmin now offers several chartplotters with built-in digital cartography of the "entire US coast + Alaska and Hawaii...." Closer reading of the sales literature indicates the chartplotters contain "BlueChart G2" series cartography.

My question is this: Has anyone compared the "old" BlueChart cartography with the "G2" series? I have not, and am not in a position to do so for some time - but I'm curious.

My guess is the "G2" series might be BlueChart Lite, since I doubt Garmin is inclined to give away the (excellent) BlueChart stuff in its Full version as a competitive strategy; but I don't know.

I would appreciate any information or thoughts on the subject.

...by-the-by... Halcyon, Wanderer, and Naknek are proceeding northward after a fun exploration from Anacortes. Naknek will be turning around in the next few days and taking a slower "exploration" southbound back to Anacortes over the next few/several weeks.

Beautiful country up here!

Casey
C-Dory Naknek
 
Casey - Give me some time to get off of work and think about my typing, and I can help you some. I have a new and an old Garmin both installed and gave the new it's first test this weekend. I don't have the BlueChart g2 cards yet (they are ordered), but I can say that the built in g2 stuff with the 3210 is pretty good for my area. Not as detailed as the old Bluechart, and substantially less than the new g2 purchased cards, but pretty darn good. Updated in March of '06, too. Even some local names are on the new ones. What I have seen, I like. It is my understanding that the built is stuff is "based" on the g2, and not all inclusive of its features. It's got a lot of features.
 
I checked the Garmin site for G2 and it looks to me like the same beans as before. Did not appear you got the entire chart catalog for North America. Looked like each card more or less corresponds to each old BlueChart region.
 
I used my new 3210 on the river for the first time this weekend, and the built in charts show the channel for the CR, the Skippanon channel, the pilings more accurately than the older BlueChart cards, spot soundings, buoys (without the numbers), and even identifies the Nygaard dock by name. I was too busy fooling around with the radar and I didn't think to zoom around the CR entrance and ocean. It seems to me, though, that the Garmin doesn't show as much detail until the GPS says you are close to the area. Anyone else notice that with BlueCharts? Up in the SJ’s I have noticed this a lot. You can move the cursor to some other area to look it over or measure the distance, but the detail is sparse. Then when you start getting closer to it physically, the detail is all there. Weird.

I’ll let you know what the g2 cards do for me if they ever get here. But I would not be hesitant to use the built in charts to navigate the lower Columbia even if I wasn't as familiar with the waters. The detail is really amazing for a free thing. I did adjust the settings for Most Detail for a while, and then set it back to Normal because just as with the original BlueCharts, the detail set to Most is just too much.

The g2 cards are pretty much the same as the originals in that the chart grouping per card is the same. The difference is newer NOAA versions where available (March '06 for my area) and some other features that may or may not be valuable to all. Like aerial photos and the ability to switch to what they call "sky view 3d" where it looks like you are driving into the map with the sky above and the water below instead of on the flat map. I guess that is to entice the video game players, but it sounds dorky to me.

There are some control differences with the new 3210 vs. the 2006C, but it is still very intuitive and easy to figure out. The coolest part is the split screen page where ½ of it is map, ¼ is radar. And ¼ is the video camera. And the screen is large enough to make sense of it all.
 
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