Each vessel fitted with an AIS transponder transmits its identity, position, course, speed and other information over a VHF channel. This is compulsory for vessels over 300 tons and all passenger ships. Quite a lot of other vessels carry them as well.

So if your boat has an AIS receiver on board you can track these vessels if they are in range, typically 20 miles or so. If the receiver has a display at all it is usually a bit rude and crude – the real trick is to feed the AIS information into your chart display system. Now you can see the AIS targets overlaid onto your navigational chart and this starts to get useful.

AIS was intended and designed as a collision avoidance mechanism however you really need a graphical chart based display to properly realize this. Nuno™ now supports AIS (hooray!) and makes a great way to display the information.

Even on a smaller boat there is a lot to be said for getting an AIS receiver. They are pretty cheap these days and benefit in terms of situational awareness is brilliant.

Configuring AIS in Nuno™ is pretty easy. You need an AIS unit with a NMEA output and then you just plug it in. That’s it. Depending on your set up the AIS NMEA stream may be multiplexed onto your GPS feed or it may be a separate connection. Either way just plug it in and Nuno™ will find it.

AIS targets are displayed as little green symbols with a vector arrow representing speed and direction. Ticks on the arrow are at one minute intervals. Hover the cursor over the target to see additional information such as name, destination and cargo. The scope of the information being broadcast can vary quite a lot.

Here is a really handy technique: Create a pencil line and drop one end onto the marker for your boat and the other onto an AIS target. The line will display range and bearing to the AIS target. Even better the line will ‘snap’ to your vessel and the AIS target and update as they move. Very useful for keeping an eye on another ship.

Nuno™ with AIS capability is being released soon. Very soon. Maybe even today. This is available as a free upgrade to all users with a current license. There are lots of other improvements in this release and some great new features just around the corner.

How do you get it? Easy. Run Nuno™ up on a PC with an internet connection. If an upgrade is available it will tell you in the Support Centre pane and there will be a download link for you to follow.

A concern commonly raised during discussions around electronic navigation systems is the way that they can contribute toward incidents. The scenarios usually revolve around lack of training and an over reliance on the computer software. In fact several grounding incidents have been directly attributed to this. In each case the ECDIS was not correctly set up for the conditions, presumably because it was not well understood. At the same time other more traditional approaches to navigation such as looking out of the window were being neglected. The inevitable result is a lot of unhappiness.

So what is really going on here? How come a system which is designed to make navigation safer is causing problems instead?

First off, we should probably assert that electronic chart systems are, for the most part, a big benefit. Very basic properties such as accuracy of positioning and ease of chart updating set such systems head and shoulders above paper charts. I can go on with a long list but you probably already know it. So where is the downside? At CherSoft, there are two issues that we are very aware of: first up the screen is not as big or clear as a paper chart, secondly the user interface can act as a barrier. Good software should be mitigating these issues by making optimal use of the screen real estate and by being easy to use. Obviously, if the software is easy to use then training is less of an issue.

But there is another angle to this.

A long time ago when Microsoft Word was a DOS application I was asked about how to set up the page layout. I had never looked at this at all before but I gave it a go and it only took a few minutes to get sorted. The secretary was impressed with my knowledge of Word. Of course I was actually making it up as I was going along but the results were fine so that didn’t matter. I’d never had any training on Word and I did not have a detailed knowledge of its settings. That was not so important because I did know the principles behind it and understood the general approach of the User Interface. My knowledge was to do with the domain rather than the details.

Understanding navigation systems is the core issue. Many systems, particularly the professional, type approved ones, are devilishly difficult to use. This may surprise you. Certainly if you had paid several thousands for a state of the art system then you might hope it would be quite approachable. The trouble is that not only are the User Interfaces, for the most part, quite primitive, but also the mechanisms around obtaining and updating charts tend to be complex. The latter is mostly associated with the dragon of Digital Rights Management. These factors mean that training, of necessity, has to be concerned with a lot of detail.

We think that the navigation system should be easy to use. It should be sufficiently easy to use that someone with knowledge of navigation and some elementary computer skills should be able to use it. I am not going to claim that Nuno™ achieves this yet, but it is what we are aiming for. This still leaves a gap though. It still leaves space for the fatal over-reliance on computers. Perhaps this is more of a cultural thing than a specific training issue. I suspect that the more you know about computers and their weaknesses then the less likely you are to drop unsuitable responsibility on one. Another way of looking at this is to consider that a computer, however clever it appears, is just a tool.

I think there needs to be convergence. The electronic tools should be useful without demanding specific knowledge. At the same time the limits of the tool should be understood at a domain level rather than in terms of the detail. My hope would be that the increasingly computer savvy people driving the ship will be using these tools so that they can spend more time looking out of the window rather than less.

Charts are square, countries aren’t, it’s a problem. There may be a vision of a utopian world where country boundaries are straight and align with a geodetic grid but the reality, as usual, is much messier. The tricky bit is that each national hydrographic office will create ENC cells with bits missing. The political ramifications of drawing a map of someone else's country can be severe. Politicians just don’t like this sort of thing and Google have managed to upset people to a remarkable degree by misplacing the odd line. So the only sensible thing to do is to create chart up to the national boundary and then stop. Of course by safe I mean politically safe. For the mariner it is a pain in the transom akin to sailing off the edge of the world.

This means we end up with multiple ENC cells of the same area at the same compilation scale but from different providers. The reason you might care about this is that you could easily end up with duplicate or similar features from both cells overlaid on each other. Depending on how your chart display software renders this it will probably look a mess, could easily be confusing and might even be dangerous.

Fortunately the good people at the International Hydrographic Office have already thought of a solution to this. Unfortunately it requires a degree of international cooperation and we (I am speaking for the whole human race now) are not very good at that. None the less several countries have been giving it a go following the principles of the Worldwide Electronic Navigational Database or WEND. This is a great idea and would be even better if it worked. I am not saying it won’t work but there is a way to go yet. One small step in the right direction has just been announced by NOAA and the Canadian Hydrographic Service. They have conceded that the boundary between the US and Canada is not straight so they have agreed on using a wrinkly one instead.

ENC cells are often cataloged and managed by the coordinates of the cell corners. This is fine most of the time and implies that the cell is square. However within the cell is a coverage object which really defines the shape of the area covered by the cell data. This can be a polygon of as much complexity as needed. So if two countries cooperate they can arrange the coverage boundaries along the international border, each country then charts its own bit and everyone is happy. The UK and France are a good example of where this works well. What is happening up on the Canadian border seems to be a little different though. They are still dividing up who does what but, see the above diagram, they are not following the border. Instead they are making sure the the cells will fit together properly but Canada is charting some of the US and visa versa. Why are they doing it this way? I have no idea. Please tell me if you can shed any light on this. Pragmatically the reason does not matter too much. The end effect will (should) be a set of ENC cells which join up nicely.

I was quietly browsing the internet the other day and came across a website which offered me a ‘cracked’ version of Nuno Navigator. This struck me as interesting so I promptly downloaded a copy and got the team here to have a look at it. I was actually quite intrigued to know how it had been cracked. In some ways I was quite flattered. Nuno does not really cost very much but someone had still gone to the the trouble of hacking it.

While the file was being examined I went off to see if I could find other free downloads of cracked versions of Nuno. Turned up a couple more. Now these all came off sites that were offering an awful lot of software by way of free downloads. In fact there appeared to be most of the applications that we more usually pay for. Someone has been doing an awful lot of hacking license enforcement systems.

First result back from the labs was that the certificate on what claimed to be the Nuno installer had changed. This is pretty easy to check for yourself. Right click on the file and then select properties. On the tab labeled ‘Digital Signatures’ you should see that the file has been signed by CherSoft. These signatures are pretty reliable. If it does not say CherSoft then it has not come for us.

The particular file we were looking at what signed with the name ‘Softdeluxe’. I have no idea who this is. We are not entirely sure what the file does either. It contains a couple of GUIDs which pop up in malware reports. It also contains a link to the Nuno download page. Best bet was that it would install something that you would probably rather not have on your computer and then take you to our website or even just download the genuine Nuno installer.

The next one we found was even more exciting. This was signed by ‘EliteCom LLC’ and appeared to be a disguised installer for Filehunter-win32.exe which very much looks like malware – a Trojan of some sort. There are many warnings on the ‘net about this one.

We checked a couple more ‘free’ downloads and concluded that no-one had hacked Nuno but that there was quite a bit of social engineering going on. The main theme appears to be one of tempting you with a free/hacked/cracked download. By the time you discover you are not getting what you hoped for it has installed something malicious. They are not even picking on Nuno especially – pretty much any current software is getting the treatment.

So anyhow, if you want to download Nuno then come to our website. If you have any doubts about what you have downloaded then check the digital signature. This is what they are for.

Windows 7 supports touch screens. Ok, that’s not very big news, touch screens have been around for a while. Wikipedia tells me that touch screens date from the 60s. Not sure about that but they certainly crop up from time to time in museums, train stations and the sort of demos that look a bit forced. Overall I’d admit to being only peripherally aware of touch screens up to the day I encountered an iPad. Multi-touch, high resolution screen, quality software and suddenly it all makes sense. So much so that using the iPad touch screen felt natural within minutes.

Now sadly Nuno™ won’t run on an iPad (or maybe it does – watch this space) but there are some nice PCs around with touch screens and we figured that Nuno™ should be right at home with these. I find with charts in particular that I really want to reach out and touch them. Once you start doing this on a screen then there is no looking back. The touch screen doesn’t have to the replace the mouse and in many ways makes a nice addition to it.

Technically a touch screen, by default, drives the software a little like a mouse. This means that many applications, without modification, can already be used with a touch screen to some extent. Of course there is always scope for tweaks and improvements. As programmers we can accept the default behavior (ok sometimes) or dive in and create custom touch screen code. The diagram below shows what we have come up with in Nuno™. This seems to work quite well. There may well be refinements in the future.

I have been experimenting with an ELO 2242L 22” Touch monitor which is great fun although I can’t decide which way is best to mount it. Upright works quite well but is a bit tiring to use after a while. Might even cause the dreaded Gorilla Arm. Lying flat (the monitor, not me) is also quite good but it won’t naturally just lie on a table. Would be really nice to make a custom table for it although the ultimate chart replacement screen will probably need to be two or three times as big. Might even have teak edging.

Elsewhere in the CherSoft research labs we’ve been looking at a Motion J3500 tablet PC. This is a very nice bit of kit. Outdoor viewable display and generally pretty tough and portable. I could image using it ashore for planning with a keyboard, mouse and so on. Then taking it aboard and just using the touch screen to control it. The built in GPS works well so along with the automatic route tracking functionality in Nuno you can have a solution that really will just work. I guess in some ways this would be like having a plotter except of course that you could check your emails and browse the web in-between times. It features hot-swappable batteries too which is a pretty neat trick.

Nuno™ 2.5, the touchy, feely edition, will be out any day now.

If you have checked the Nuno™ website lately you may have noticed a link on the main menu bar entitled ‘Mongolia’. We are supporting a team of young lads (Josh, Dan, Oli, Ollie & Rory) who are driving across Mongolia. This is a thoroughly worthy endeavor on its own. The guys have 10,000 miles or so of deserts and mountains to cross in a small underpowered van that they put together themselves. Nominally it’s a competition but really it’s about the sense of adventure, tackling the difficult and working as a team. The guys are also raising money for charity and if that were not enough they will also be donating what is left of the van and their equipment to the local communities around UlaanBaatar (assuming they get there).

 

The Mongolian dessert has some remarkable similarities with the open ocean. It is a vast undulating expanse where you can go days without seeing even a hint of another person. Another commonality is that your cell phone won’t work. What has this got to do with Nuno™? Well we have fitted the team’s car with a Skywave satellite transceiver. This is nifty bit of kit which combines a GPS with a mechanism for sending and receiving data, worldwide, via satellite in a very cost effective way. There is an awful lot you can do with this and we are working at integrating it with Nuno™. For now the Mongolian Rally is a trial. The unit is set up to send back a position every few hours so we can track their position. They can also send and receive short messages. The Inmarsat ground station passes data back and forth to a CherSoft server and then we can make good things happen.

Here are some of the features we are planning:

When you are on-board you can connect Nuno™ to the Skywave box and use it as a positioning device. You will also be able to send and receive short messages - like a global SMS facility. Friends will be able to track your position on a dedicated web page – you only give the password to the people you want to see this.

When you leave your vessel you will still be able to track its position, on Nuno, using messages via the satellite network and the Internet. So straight away we can set up a virtual boundary fence and send an alert (SMS/email) if your anchor drags or someone moves your boat.

The unit supports a variety of sensors and these can be configured to keep an eye on things while you are away. Messages will be sent at regular intervals or immediately if an alarm is triggered:

Battery voltage with a trigger if it drops too low

Bilge alarm

Entry alarm triggered on doors or hatchways

Smoke/fire/gas alarm

Ignition alarm if someone tries to start the engine

 

There is a lot of useful functionality here. Can’t tell you any exact prices at the moment but despite the high-end sophisticated monitoring and messaging it will not be high-end prices.

In the meantime one of our trial units has just crossed Europe and is now bouncing its way into Asia. You can check their progress here. Good luck Josh, Dan, Oli, Ollie & Rory. Be safe and have fun.

Nuno™ Navigator is named after the 15^th century Portuguese explorer Nuno Tristão. This Nuno was one of Prince Henry’s most valued and trusted captains. And this Henry was none other than Henry the Navigator, arguably one of the fathers of modern navigation.

Nuno is notable for his explorations of the West African coast which helped established Portugal as a leader in the emerging colonial world. Previously no one had attempted to venture out to this region which had been dubbed the Ocean of Darkness. Many terrifying myths surrounded it with claims that monsters swam in the seas and the overhead sun made the seawater boil. If a ship was lucky enough to survive these hazards it was only a matter of time before they would reach the edge of the flat world and plummet into the abyss. Nuno was only marginally perturbed by this but did realize he was going to need a good ship.

Typically the vessels used for long voyages were slow, heavy and not very maneuverable. This was no good. Nuno wanted an agile boat that could sail up rivers. Fortunately Henry stepped in with his newly designed Caravel sporting a dashing lanteen rig. Later this type of ship would be used to discover America and become the exploration vessel of choice but first of all Nuno took a prototype to Africa.

His first trip was to Capo Branco. The furthest any European had been beyond Rio de Ouro and a significant step across the Ocean of Darkness. Now I should mention at this point that although Nuno was heroic in many ways that one of the reasons he was doing this at all was to catch slaves. This sort of thing was quite acceptable back then (or at least it was mostly acceptable by most people except the slaves) so we will try to not let it distract us from the good bits which are about navigation and exploration.

Nuno did three subsequent expeditions each time pushing further south and pushing the limits of exploration and navigation. Beyond Capo Blanco was the Bay of Arguin. On his third expedition he reached the border of Senegal and announced that he had discovered sub-Saharan Africa. With his fourth and final expedition in 1446 he got south of Cap Vert and may have discovered Guinea-Bissau. There is some debate about this. However, wherever it was that he actually rolled up, there were also a lot of poison arrow wielding locals. They justifiably took exception to the slave thing and promptly killed Nuno and his crew.

So bold, innovative, adventurous, pushing the limits of technology and a great navigator. We like all these things. Many years ago we named our professional navigation system after Henry the Navigator so it seemed appropriate that our next generation system should be called Nuno.

The Wikipedia article on Nuno is a bit dry but informative.

These days Nuno has a couple of statues to his credit. A naval frigate was named after him and he has appeared on Portuguese coins and bank notes. My favorite is this article explaining how an abandoned statue of Nuno was found after the war in Guinea-Bissau and moved into the city. I will visit this one day and in the meantime can anyone send me a photo of it that I could post here?

We discussed software licenses in general a while ago. This was followed by a blog which explained how the license for Nuno works. Now that the UK version of Nuno is launched we are keeping the license mechanism pretty much the same but it seems worthwhile to run over it again. Just what does it cost and what do you get?

Software licenses can be a bit of a minefield. With Nuno we have tried to keep everything simple and sensible. We are also trying to provide a deal which is fair, understandable and does not contain any ‘gotcha’ clauses that mean you end up paying more than you expected.

The US version of Nuno sells for $100, the UK version sells for £120 inc. VAT. The UK version costs a bit more because we need to add VAT and also because we have to pay for the chart data. Here is how it all works. UK prices are in brackets (like this) and include VAT.

Summary

For an initial outlay of $100 (£120) you can have a license for a state of the art navigation system and a one year subscription to full support and update services. After a year you can choose to renew your subscription for a further $50 (£60).

If you want to know more; keep reading.

How to buy Nuno

On the Nuno website you create an account and pay for Nuno with your credit card, debit card or PayPal. This gets you a license to use Nuno and a subscription for a year.

How to get Nuno and Install it

You may have already downloaded Nuno to try it out before you bought it. If not you can download it now. This will be the very latest version. As soon as Nuno starts up on your computer it will ask you for your account logon credentials. This is the same email address and password you used to create your account. Nuno will use these to activate over the Internet. Once activated Nuno is fully functional.

You can have Nuno installed and activated on two computers at the same time. This is so that you can have one PC for route planning and another, maybe a laptop, for use at sea.

You can install Nuno onto a new computer. If you are lucky enough to upgrade your computer then remove Nuno from the old one, install it on the new one, set up your logon as before and you are away. Use the Import/Export facilities to transfer your overlays.

During the next year

The subscription is valid for a year and entitles you to the following:

You will be able to use our chart updating service. This is basically just one click to update all your charts.

You will be notified of any updates to Nuno.

Occasionally we find bugs or problems in the code. More often we want to roll out a bunch of usability and implementation improvements. You will be able to download, install and use the new version of Nuno with these fixes and improvements.

In the next year we are planning to add several new features including AIS support, S63 (commercial, encrypted ENC), auto-helm and a rolling road (whatever that is). You will be able to download, install and use the new versions of Nuno with these new features. Recently we added support for Active Captain to Nuno and all registered users got this as a free upgrade.

If you encounter any problems or have any issues you will be able to contact us directly and probably have your question answered by one of the programming team.

After a year

The subscription expires in a year.

At the end of the year we will invite you to renew your subscription. This will cost just $50 (£60). If you renew your subscription then you can carry on with all the good things I have just described for another year.

Expired subscription

You can still use Nuno. It is yours to keep and use whenever you want.

If you ever lose your copy of Nuno you will be able to log into your account and download a fresh copy.

You can still update your charts but not via the update service. You will need to download updates directly from NOAA and then install them manually.

You will not be able to upgrade Nuno. Activation will be frozen at the latest version on the date that your subscription expired.

Small Print

This prices are all correct as of July 2011. We reserve the right to alter them at any time. This does not mean we are going to suddenly start charging a fortune but it does mean that there may occasionally be some changes to account for inflation and the likes.

Marine IT & Electronics (MITE) is a bi-monthly journal published by The Institute of Marine Engineering, Science & Technology. The Institute is an august professional body. Established in London in 1889, they claim to be the leading international membership body and learned society for marine professionals. Over 15,000 members worldwide.

Certainly they get my vote because they have been reading the Nuno™ blog. The other month we were ruminating on big screensand Kevin, the editor of MITE, picked up on this to produce a very nice article interestingly entitled "How to fit an elephant on a 19-inch screen” for the June/July edition.

Imagine your computer just crashed. Maybe you don’t need to stretch your imagination too far for that. They crash, they run out of battery, they get unplugged and sometimes they are simply switched off. The thing is, in this imaginary scenario, that you need Nuno back up and monitoring the route you are still trying to follow. No problem. Start Nuno. It comes back up just as you last saw it and everyone can get back to what they were supposed to be doing in the first place.

Ahem. Did you see what just happened then? Nuno went back to work like it is supposed to. Maybe I should mention what didn’t happen. You didn’t have to reconfigure the GPS connection. You did not need to reload charts, open a file, recover your route, change a setting or anything. It just worked. Whenever something is changed in Nuno it gets written to the hard disc. Sounds simple but many computer programs don’t do this. Instead you get questions like ‘Do you want to save your file?’. With Nuno we figured that being able to restart easily was a really useful feature so we built it in right from the start.

Restartablilty (I may be making up words here) is a big reason for needed multi-level undo and redo. This is a lot less simple. Well, it is simple to use but a real bitch to write the code for. Thing is, without the document style ‘file’ and ‘save’ if you accidentally delete all your work then it is gone forever. And that is not a very friendly thing for a program to do. So instead we implemented the ability to ‘undo’ your last change, or the one before that, or any change since you started Nuno. You can also ‘redo’ any changes that you undid.

 

For even more restartability you can get Nuno to start as soon as you power up your computer.

This method is the same for XP, Vista and Windows 7

First get a copy of the Nuno Navigator shortcut:

• Click on the ‘Start’ button
• Click on ‘All Programs’
• In the list which appears scroll to ‘Nuno Navigator’, left click to expand
• Select ‘Nuno™ Navigator 2011’, right click, choose ‘copy’.

Then open up your Startup folder. This is where you put shortcuts for any application you want to start up as you log on:

• Click on the ‘Start’ button
• Click on ‘All Programs’
• In the list which appears scroll to Startup, right click and click on ‘Explore’.

In the Explorer window you have just opened , right click and choose ‘paste’.

The Nuno™ Navigator 2011 shortcut should now appear in the Startup folder. It will start automatically when you log on.