North up or Course up or Track up

A

adru

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Kinda hijacked Capt. Bills Garmin thread so I am going to do the poll as a new thread.

North up or Course up or Track up on your chart plotter?
 
I always like to know what is in front of us. It has worked very well for us coming down the East Coast of the U.S. from NY all the way to Great Exuma. If I see something I do not like, I zoom out and poke around and change course accordingly. But usually I have the course/route laid down well enough to avoid diversions.

When you look out the windshield what are you looking at?
 
North up. Unless you are use to rotating the paper chart. My blond wife needs "course up" but I have to nap with one eye open.
 
My heading sensor orients my screen for heading up I prefer it this way.
 
What's the difference between 'Track-up' and 'course-up'??

I like direction of travel 'UP'.
 
My old Magellan Meridian handheld and some other GPS's use the term Track UP which I would guess is the same as Direction of Travel UP.
 
I always use my paper chart to start with and plot the course , waypoints and all, then go north up on the GPS. I boat in the western end of Lake Erie and we have to be right.
 
It's usually north up or heading up.
Not sure what you mean course up or track up.
They are the same.

I like heading up
 
Course "up" here as a preference.

Has anybody tried the auto-routing features with Garmin G2 Vision charts? I'm a fan of the option. It's like having an auto-pilot though; it's fearless! It's great to get a general route to places unknown very quickly but not an excuse to be stupid. It has no idea where fish traps or other unmarked hazards are, but it's great for getting a general track to reference.
 
Course up for the most part. But I use North up at anchor and in some other situations.
 
North up on chart plotter so I can orient to paper chart and compass.
Heading up on radar so that I can determine quickly where an object happens to be.

Gene
 
Also N up on my old Northstar for nice steady display, which is not the case with Course or Heading on these units. But if I had a multifunction unit that overlaid radar on the charts, I would sync with Heading up since that is far & away the most rationale display of radar returns IMO.
 
I have always preferred charts to be North up ( paper or electronic ); Radar on "Heading up", my body assumes that radar is a "visual" input and I more successfully interpret it the same way as I see with my eyes.

plus, as Sandy sez, A plotter on "North up" is more steady than dealing with the constant, jerky screen re-draws when heading or track up.
 
I swing both ways on this. North up makes more sense to me most of the time. I always look at a paper chart north up too. This way I always instantly know which direction I'm heading. That said, I use head up in unfamiliar channels, because here it's more about turn left or right rather than compass course. I also use head up to reconcile to the radar so if I see a radar target to port I can more easily see if it's a charted object.

Also interesting to note that electronic vector charts lend themselves well to course up/heading up orientation as labels turn with the chart. Using electronic raster charts, heading up makes everything skewed going anyway but north.
 
Depends on what you are doing. If you are surveying a trip plan, north up. If you are operating then course up. This is the way all aircraft operate by the way.
 
I usually use north up on the plotter, course up on the radar. Admiral usually prefers course up on the back-up tablets. Or when she's at the helm, we change the plotter to course up, and I change the tablet to north up.

-Chris
 
Always north up. For some reason I get completely confused when I m looking at a course up display...
 
When you are caught in blinding windswept rain in a narrow channel and need to know where to aim the boat right now, course up is the best.
 
North up requires a different mindset to follow.

That's all they used in the Navy years ago. Don't know if it was due to technology at the time or what.
 
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