BlueChart

What is BlueChart™ offshore marine cartography?

BlueChart™ cartography is GARMIN’s exclusive marine cartography. It complements GARMIN’s new line of handheld mapping products and marine chart plotters. This line of cartography products is designed to provide interactive viewing of detailed nautical chart data, thereby providing navigators with innovative object-oriented cartography. These detailed electronic nautical charts look just like paper charts when displayed on your GARMIN chart plotter. Descriptive details for features typically found on nautical charts can easily be viewed with a simple key press. Cursor movements over the chart provide descriptions for contour depths, chart number, navaid name, and much more. BlueChart data will include shaded depth contours, inter-tidal zones, spot soundings, wrecks, navaids, port plans, restricted areas, cable areas, anchorages, and more. Additionally, BlueCharts include information from the paper chart used in the digitization process such as chart number, name, scale, revision date, and Notice-to-Mariners date.

Paired with any of our new plotters, this cartography provides the detail of paper charts, giving you twice the coverage area of typical charts for half the price. Compatible products include the new GARMIN marine chart plotters: GPSMAPŽ 176, GPSMAP 176C, GPSMAP 182, GPSMAP 188 Sounder, GPSMAP 232, GPSMAP 238 Sounder, GPSMAP 2006, and the GPSMAP 2010. The GPSMAP 76 is also compatible with GARMIN MapSource Blue Chart on CD-ROM, which will become available later this summer

Blue Chart Features:

Vector data with paper chart-like appearance
Large coverage areas for ease of selection and greater overall satisfaction
Object-oriented functionality provides complete description for chart feature
Chart-by-chart presentation provides best resolution and detail that the chart will allow
Shaded depth contours and inter-tidal zones with spot soundings
Aids to navigation with view range and coverage including light sectors information
Port plans
U.S. tide data
Descriptions for chart name, number, Notice to Mariners date, publisher, and release date
Wrecks, restricted areas, cable areas, anchorages, shoals, spoilage and much more
Bridges are described indicating construction type, clearance, length, etc.
All data in WGS 84 datum

GARMIN serves up this additional cartography in two forms—preprogrammed data cards or MapSource™ CD-ROMs. MapSource CDs contain detailed maps that can be downloaded to data cards or directly to units that don’t accept data cards. A variety of CDs available soon will offer detail that includes offshore cartography, fishing information, inland features, topographic maps, locations of services and attractions and more.

The initial release of Blue Chart provides detailed coverage areas for the United States, including Alaska and Hawaii. New product releases will occur on an ongoing basis as coverage areas become available, with European coverage coming later this year.