I bought a Standard Horizon CP180i chart plotter from the London boat show a few weeks ago. I managed to get quite a good deal, and when I was into HAM radio a few years ago (yes, even I have a geeky side) I always had Yaesu radios. They were bomb proof, feature packed, and compared to the competition just a much better deal.

Standard Horizon CP180i

Standard Horizon is the marine brand name of Yaesu, also known as Vertex Standard, so I knew what I was buying was gong to be good quality kit.

The chart plotter is fantastic, and was fitted to the nav station of my boat within a few hours of getting it home. ll wired up and ready to go… almost. The CP180 (and 180i) have built in global cartography to a resulution of 2nm. Out of the box this makes the unit sort of useful for measuring the rough distance between two countries (which I spent a while playing with), but that’s about it. The plotter can’t really be used for anything useful – like navigation – until you add a proper chart package.

Now, the charting cartridges (C-MAP MAX) are quite expensive, almost half the price of the chart plotter itself, so a deciding factor in the deal was the fact that the CP180i came with a free cartridge of an area of your choice.

These things are never without a catch though, are they. It turns out you get a voucher for a chart of your choice and have to send it off to Jeppesen, the folks being C-MAP. You can’t post it to them and are given only two other choices, fax, or email. Now, I don’t have a scanner (nor does work) so I had to opt for the fax. Unfortunately the voucher is printed on card and wouldn’t fit through the fax machine, so after a few email exchanges with the Italian (head) office (aided by my Italian friend at work), I arranged to take a photo of the voucher and email that over.

Now, usually in these cases you have to wait an age to receive your claim, 28 days seems to be the default period, but to my great surprise Jeppesen had sent the C-map cart via airmail the very day I sent them the email. I sent the email yesterday, the map arrived this morning.

Now that is service for you!