After looking at the market options to upgrade our chartplotter to integrate with an AIS transciever and loaded with charts for Australia and SE Asia, I came across the Onwa range manufactured in China. The big advantages are:
- cheap price
- AIS is integrated in the unit so only one device to mount and no NMEA cables
- free and extensive k-charts provided by the manufacturer with updates downloadable from the Onwa website. These are similar to c-maps but without information such as current flows.
The unit’s details can be viewed at http://www.onwamarine.com/kp-8299/
Fortunately a friend had such a unit on his boat and so I went for look. Yes, it did what it was supposed to do, the build quality seemed pretty good, and the display was easy to read. So, I contacted ONWA and purchased a unit with payment via Western Union (which was easily done at Australia Post).
I had a ‘project manager’ at Onwa who was very quick and reliable in responding to my emails. At one point, she seemed rather tardy to reply, but after a couple of days I found that her email had in fact been filtered as spam by my gmail. <sigh> This discovery was preceded by a phone call from her at which time I learned that written communication was far easier than verbal communication. Of course, even though her English was not great, it was far better than my Cantonese which was non-existent.
But the language issue did cause problems. Some of the nuances in setting up the unit were not clear in the user manual or the online documentation and it took me many hours to resolve them.
Entering the vessel’s AIS information.
- This is done at startup time and when the warning screen appears pressing ‘Menu’ and ‘Esc’ simulatenously causes the AIS setup screen to appear.
- This cannot be reached from the regular menus.
- Entering my MMSI number and the vessel’s name I tried to Write to the unit’s memory but I was given a ‘Write failed’ message.
- The solution was to select AIS Model as KS8A_2 (rather than the default HS).
- After that the AIS details could be written back to the unit.
- Note also that the AIS version number did not appear unless I clicked on ‘Read’
Displaying beacons and lights on k-charts.
- This caused me a lot of grief.
- Following the readme file linked to from the Onwa FAQs page, I loaded only the KCHART_AUS directory to a blank sd card.
- When I loaded this card into the unit and ensured that the menus selected kcharts loaded from an sd card, I could see the chart with depths and place names but there were no lights or beacons displayed.
- It turns out that there is also an ‘Icon’ directory which must be extracted to the SD Card.
- When I did this and loaded the sd card the lights and beacons magically appeared.
Fortunately there is a small but growing community of Onwa chartplotter users who I found friendly and helpful. Their guidance and encouragement helped me to persevere and solve the setup issues. It is in that spirit that I offer these notes.Once I have used the chartplotter for a month or two I plan to post a followup review.
svbrahminy 