Creating Custom Raster charts using Insightmapcreator

I have found Insight mapcreator to be a brilliant tool for creating charts for HDS units and Elite units. There is no point in trying to be too clever with it - it allows very simple operation and minimal knowledge to actually make a functional chart.

Working out what's gone wrong however can need just a little more than minimal knowledge.

I test the charts I make on emulators. The public domain emulators are all available on the Lowrance website here.

At the moment not all versions of the charts you make will work with all the emulators. In fact there are more that won't than will. I test using the Elite5 emulator, and this appears to work with all AT5 versions up to 10. At the moment I'm sticking with AT5 version 10, version 12 loses some compatibility with older units.

If your charts build with a few error status messages - its normal. If they build and you can't see text on isobaths or land contours, your attribute formatting is wrong. See the previous page.

Stick with basic colours until you are sure that your unit supports them, and if you make a chart using some of the new exotic colours don't expect it to work on older units.

All of the work is done in your GIS application. Insight mapcreator is simply a compiler. You need to have all your attributes correctly set, and layers correctly assigned. If you have a problem you don't need to unload from Insight mapcreator - it simply holds a list of shapefiles. You change the shapefiles in your GIS application, then just run the program again.

Set it up to save files into your emulators map folder (for example maps0 on elite5). You'll need to stop the emulator before running Insight mapcreator