Magellan FX324 Chartplotter

Over recent years, GPS chartplotters have become inexpensive enough for most yacht owners to consider purchasing one. We took the plunge eighteen months ago, acquiring a Magellan FX324Map Colour at the London Boat Show.

The selection of a model required considerable thought as the yacht on which it was to be fitted is used for running RYA courses. With the students in mind, we therefore wanted a piece of kit that was practical and user friendly, and certainly not in any way daunting. I'd already spent several months poring over articles comparing vector and raster charts and different types of card. Sometimes I felt more confused after reading the articles than before!

To simplify the choice I decided to concentrate on one primary factor - ease of use. The operators would be novice sailors with just six days in which to become competent in the use of the device. It isn't always possible for an Instructor to constantly go below to explain in detail how to use equipment - students must be able to work it out after a little initial instruction. This meant that the interface must be intuitive and uncomplicated.

There seems to be a trend nowadays to build kit with just a few multi-purpose buttons or controls. I suppose that this looks sleek and modern, but I'm sure that I cannot be the only one who dislikes it. In my experience, the apparent simplicity of minimal buttons leads to much greater complexity when you have to put them into practice. Sometimes the button has to be pressed only once, and yet sometimes you have to press and hold for three seconds until the display flashes. Which combination of buttons brings up the screen you want? How do you get into the settings? How do you get back to where you were?

I didn't want anyone to have to consult a manual if possible. Before the show I drew up a list of what I anticipated would be the most frequent tasks required. Armed with my list, I went around the stands making sure to ignore factors such as design, maker, and cost, and simply look for a piece of equipment that could be used without instruction. Such a technique proved to be quite revealing.

Having narrowed my choice down to two, I settled on the Magellan FX324Map Colour as it seemed to be the more robustly constructed. The decision was also influenced by the fact that we'd used a Magellan hand-held GPS very satisfactorily for many years.

We're now halfway through our second season with the FX324 and have no regrets about our choice. The students have been quick to master it, and I can get on board for the occasional trip and immediately remember how everything is done.

So what is it that makes the FX324 so easy to use? The features that appeal to me are:

• A menu button which takes you directly to screens for accomplishing most tasks.
• Up, Down, Left and Right arrows to move around, and Enter to select.
• An Escape button immediately returns you to the previous screen.
• The alphanumeric keypad similar to that on a mobile phone makes it easy to select menu items by number, and to enter waypoint names.
• Buttons let you switch displays to show your position, speed, course over the ground (in extra large characters), distance to waypoint etc.
• Waypoints can be combined into routes, calculating the total length, distance and bearing for each segment.

The Magellan lets you store up to 1000 waypoints, and added to these can be names eight characters long, comments of 22 characters and a choice of icon to be displayed on the chart. We've found this more than adequate for our needs. Most screens can be customised to suit your own requirements. What we use on a teaching yacht may not be what you'd want for sailing your home area.

An unexpected bonus has been how useful it is during night-sailing, when it can be hard to take a fix. It's reassuring to see the boat's position plotted where you estimate it to be. You can adjust the backlighting to a low level so that it doesn't destroy your night vision.

There are 896 base points around the world plus local ports on the chart, as well as tide calculation functions, that due to our sailing in non-tidal waters, we haven't been able to use. The Magellan isn't perfect. It can store up to 30 reversible routes, but I find it irritating that you can't select a route by entering its number; you have to scroll down the list to find it. It would also be nice if routes were stored in alphabetical order in a similar way to the waypoints, yet all in all, these are minor points compared to our overall satisfaction with the product.

	Melody McKay Burton

Melody and her husband, George, an RYA Yachtmaster Instructor, owned and sailed a UFO 31 on the West of Scotland for many years. One autumn she took some friends sailing in the Ionian and discovered that it was possible to spend a week on a yacht without oilskins. Inspired by their trip, Melody gave up her job as an IT consultant in 2001 and she, George, and their two dogs, moved to Greece where they bought a 44ft Atlantic sloop. They have sailed most of the Greek waters, and now offer skippered sailing holidays and run Aegean Sailing School, an RYA recognised training centre based on Aegina Island in the Saronic Gulf. Email:melody@aegeansailingschool.com Websites:www.aegeansailingschool.com and www.sailvalentine.com