Free NOAA RNC and ENC Nautical Charts for Download
Recently the NOAA added “Raster Navigation Charts” or RNC’s to their chart download section. “Electronic Navigation Charts” or ENC’s have been available for some time.
RNC’s are visual replicas of paper charts - essentially large digital images without the compression artifacts of jpegs. RNC’s will look the same across different software viewers.
ENC’s are quite different - they are more similar to mapping files for electronic chart plotters. ENC’s encode each element on a map (marker, depth contour, light, etc.) as a unique entity with a set of attributes depending on its type. The look of ENC charts depends on the particular software used to view them. ENC’s take less memory than RNC’s.
Read on for our recommended RNC/ENC viewer and downloads for Northwest Florida map files.
NOAA’s Office of Coast Survey is the home of RNC and ENC downloads for coastal and ocean charts. ENC’s are also available from the Army Corps of Engineers for Federal Inland Waterways (they call them iENC’s for ‘inland’).
RNC Sample
ENC Sample
One can see from the samples that both chart types show the same information - just in different formats. Since the RNC’s are static images, they tend to include more information on the base layer. The ENC’s are clickable (depending on the viewer) allowing a user to get more information on certain features like a wreck or bridge without the need to show this information for every object at once. The iENC’s tend to include water level pictures of bridges along the waterways.
Downloading Viewers
Various RNC and ENC viewers are linked for download at the NOAA website. We’ve tried most and recommend Coastal Explorer Trial by Rose Point Navigation Systems. Coastal Explorer is compatible with RNC and ENC charts and allows easy switching between types when both are loaded. It has good built-in logic on managing the display of charts based on zoom level and performs well even with large charts on a modest Athlon 2000 machine.
The Google Earth Alternative
DestinSharks.com has announced our EarthNC™ project to convert all NOAA and Army Corp ENC charts to the Google Earth KMZ format. This allows you to get all the benefits of the marine vector charts plus the benefits of Google Earth’s ease of use, hi-resolutions imagery, and development cycle. You can read more about the EarthNC project and join our beta test on our Google Earth Marine Maps page.
Downloading Charts
Coastal Explorer can link you directly to the NOAA and Army Corps chart pages under their “Tools - Download Charts” option or you can link to NOAA charts HERE and Army Corps iENCs HERE.
Nortwest Florida Charts
For your convenience, you can download the current (as of 20 Jun 2006) set of charts for Northwest Florida coastal waters from Pensacola to Port St Joe using the links below.
September 7th, 2006 at 12:16 pm
[…] Current functionality is limited to simple panning and zooming and they do not support an easy way to print selected areas of the map. On the plus side, load times and performance seem pretty good. This is a good way to determine which maps sets you might want to download for use in one of the more dedicated chart programs. […]
November 1st, 2006 at 7:29 pm
Nice Site