Navigating the Baltic Sea labyrinth
By Laura Ertimo
Pdf-file of the article, from Positio ICC Special Issue 2011
Thanks to its geologic history Baltic Sea has one of the world’s most beautiful and yet treacherous archipelagos. This makes navigation in the area a challenge, as well to merchant ships and SAR vessels as to the hundreds of thousands of leisure boaters that sail through our short summer. Loisto is trying to ease the challenge by versatile functions and vector maps in various navigation programs.
Last few Ice Ages have formed a basin with labyrinthine rocky shores and relatively shallow waters between Finland, Sweden and the Baltic countries and their major ports. These conditions form a geographical setting for both merchant shipping and utility traffic as well as yachting. Navigational conditions in Finnish waters differ highly from those on e.g. Mediterranean or North Sea areas and requirements for both map data and navigation programs are particular. In comparison with larger seas with strong currents and tidal waves to consider, seafaring in the Baltic Sea is mostly about navigating to avoiding islets and rocks underwater. Loisto navigation programs are designed to meet these special conditions.
Loisto software for pros and enthusiasts
Hannu Säles, the creator of Loisto navigation software, started out with a strong programming background, experience in leisure boating and an order from The Finnish Maritime Administration. In 1994, he was asked to create a program to aid the maintaining and improving of fairways. At the beginning of 2011 Hannu Säles sold Loisto software making Karttakeskus the developer and distributor of Loisto programs.
There are 8 200 kilometers of coastal fairways and 8 000 kilometers of inland waterways with over 33 000 aids to navigation – that is lighthouses, beacons, buoys and such to maintain. Every year ice shield covering most of the Finnish waters moves and damages these crucial aids and makes maintenance both time-consuming and expensive. The most versatile of Loisto programs, Iso Loisto, is made for professional use for the maintenance of ports and fairways.
Other professional users of Loisto software include members of The Finnish Lifeboat Institution. Iso Loisto and Uusi Loisto programs are installed in computers on board on over 100 SAR vessels. These programs provide several special functions designed for rescuing purposes. They include the generation of search and rescue patterns for rescue vessels and helicopters as well as the generation of night navigation notations from an automatically created route plan.
Although Loisto programs were initially designed for professional use there is a growing group of leisure boaters, recreational fishers and sailors using Uusi Loisto and the newest addition to Loisto family Tasku Loisto II. The basic elements of Loisto programs are visual and digital positioning (when connected to GPS device), two to four parallel map views with different scales, map data or content and route planning options. Uusi Loisto and Iso Loisto programs can be connected to self-steering gear, compass, radar and anemometer, for instance. When connected to required devices Uusi Loisto produces data about sailboats performance and diverse log information.
Combining marine chart and topographical data
One of the key elements that set Loisto programs apart from chart plotters and other navigation programs is the high quality of the map data. The data for the Finnish territorial waters is obtained from the Finnish Transport Agency’s Maritime Services. WGS84 vector data in the modern INT-FI format allows versatile functions such as automatic routing on waterways, specific information on aids of navigation and other chart objects, and adjusting chart display options. Many boaters find it easier to read Loisto maps that have the same colors as printed sea charts in comparison to chart plotter maps that tend to have the opposite color schemes.
INT-FI data provides more elaborate information for small vessels and leisure boating that use shallow waterways and move also off fairways than data produced within S57 standard for large merchant shipping vessels. Loisto programs also have a unique option to combine marine chart data with the topographical vector data from The National Land Survey of Finland in order to create even a more detailed picture of the coastal areas. This is one of the features cherished by the SAR troops as they need to be able to move where ever help is called for.
The combination of a marine chart and topographical data can be viewed as a safety issue. Vessels have to be able to give way to each other and move away from the fairways which can prove to be hazardous on narrow channels. When topographical data is added to marine chart shallow ridges and reed beds appear more clearly. The combination of topographical and marine chart data is visualized emphasizing the marine chart data.
Automatic routing along waterways
Thanks to the high quality of INT-FI marine chart vector data, Loisto programs are able to automatically route a vessel from a given point to any destination along the waterway network within the Finnish territorial waters. This is an option familiar to all users of car navigation systems but far less known in marine conditions. In chart plotters tracks are created manually point by point. Loisto programs create routes simply between a starting point and a destination and variations for different weather conditions are easy to check by just adding a point on the route.
In Uusi Loisto, routing can be modified to suite the vessel in use by giving its draft and so the program will only use deep enough waterways. Users can add their own routes to the route network and include them in automatic routing. Routing options are also applicable on mainland. All Loisto map packages include NLS’s Digiroad ® dataset for the Finnish roads.
The datasets for Loisto programs cover all the Finnish territorial waters and those navigable lakes that are charted by the Finnish Transport Agency’s Maritime Services. Topographic data covers all Finland. In addition to the Finnish data, there are marine chart datasets also for Estonia and Sweden.
Laura Ertimo is a geographer working at Karttakeskus Oy as a product manager. laura.ertimo[at]karttakeskus.fi
Karttakeskus Oy is a Finnish geoinformation company that provides GIS software solutions, outsource services, GIS consultation, spatial data and a large variety of domestic, foreign and customized map products.
Iso Loisto and Uusi Loisto are versatile navigation programs for PC/iMac users.
Tasku Loisto II is easy-to-use multi-platform software that operates in Windows CE and Symbian systems as well as in ordinary Windows environments.
The name Loisto stands for “Sector Light” in Finnish, so Iso Loisto is “Big SL”, Uusi Loisto is “New SL” and Tasku Loisto is “Pocket SL”.
6.8.2011 10:37