Coastal Loran-C & GPS Coordinates

Capt. Charlie Walker

I’m going to fill you in on a computer program that I’m using now to manage my Loran and GPS numbers. I’ve used three programs that are out on the market for this now, and the "Coastal Loran-C & GPS Coordinates" CD from Weak Industries is far and away the best there is.

I have Just about 2,000 Loran numbers for the West coast of Florida from Bayport through Boca Grande. Like most charter captains, over the years I have tried to keep them in a "little black book". My book just became too unwieldy and stuffed so tightly that every time I opened it, the results were sort of like Fibber Magee’s closet (for you old-timers out there that remember Fibber and his closet). You just never knew what would fall out next. Over the last few years, I’ve been trying to manage all those numbers on the computer, but no software really met my needs until this CD hit the market. From the top, there are over 15,000 coordinates on the CD. The reason that there are so many is that the entire USCG Light List for the US and Canada are included. This is a great safety feature. For Florida there are over 8,000 numbers. Over 4,500 are fishing spots with 928 in Pinellas County waters. There are over 1,000 wrecks with 78 listed in Pinellas. There are over 1,000 reefs in Florida with 152 in Pinellas, and of course it lists all the passes in the state. This part of the CD itself makes it more than worth the investment if you are a boater, fisherman or diver, but then it goes on to let you enter your own numbers in a separate file or files. As for managing all this information, that’s where the program really shines! To list the numbers you can sort by State, County, Longitude, Latitude, Chapter (this is the file where the numbers are stored), or the name of the spot, all of this in either descending or ascending order. You can then take this information and plot a grid with all the spots that you have chosen in your sorting operation and then print this information out to plan your day of fishing, boating, or diving. In addition, you can plan your trip by entering this information as a route and then it will tell you which direction and how far to each waypoint. This is a great function because it saves you a lot of time running around from spot to spot during your fishing day.

All the above would make this a truly great program but there is one more feature that is fantastic. I can’t explain it all fully in this short space, but one thing I have always complained about when using the other programs is converting my Loran TD’s to Latitude and Longitude to use in my GPS. Many programs, Loran units, and some GPS units will convert TD’s to Lat/Lon but you can almost never find the spot that you want to go to when using these conversions. The reason is that most use an average ASF correction factor while others use none at all to calculate TD’s to Lat/Lon. An average ASF is too large a difference of correction factor to be accurate. GPS itself is 10 times less accurate than Loran and when these bad conversions are made, it makes the numbers virtually unusable. Weak Industries has programmed EVERY ASF conversion factor into their CD right from the USCG list, this is approximately 640,000 correction factors and the conversion is as accurate as possible. Of course the only way to utilize this accuracy is by using a GPS with a differential unit that will give you 10 to 20 foot accuracy. It’s really technobabble from this point on and I don’t pretend to understand all of it. Suffice to say this is ONE GREAT PROGRAM and I think so much of it that I have even put it in my on-line catalog. If you want more information on the program, you may call me at 727-546-7257 or go to Southern Charm Products at http://www.flfish.com/fl/Catalog/CaptRod/index.htm .

Capt. Charlie Walker