Ihad been a happy Nobeltec user from v 4.x to 6.5. When v 7 came out, I refused to upgrade due to their attitude towards supporting BSB 4.0 charts. While they did change their tune, since I had rushed out and bought the last available BSB3 versions of the areas I needed, there was no longer a need to upgrade. Now desiring ENC support, I looked at both Nobeltec 8.1 and Coastal Explorer v 1.1. Although I found some nice features in C.E., they didn't outweigh the diference in price. $400 for C.E. and $170 (boat show price) for Nobeltec VNS 8.1 So happily I installed VNS 8.1 on my system, only to find out that VNS will only install the ENC charts that are listed in the catalog.031 file. If you downloaded the charts in groups, the catalog.031 file only contains those charts of the latest download. Coastal Explorer loaded all the charts I had on my system without any difficulty. So I returned Nobeltec VNS after conferring with their tech support and sales department. They confirmed that there was no workaround. I will say that they were gracious in their support and allowing the return, even though the package had been opened and installed. Nobeltec also has a glitch, where dark areas appear on the charts. See the samples at the website below. http://tinyurl.com/pcy5l (These are jpgs, so there is a little graininess from the image compression) These are both stock - out of the box settings, except I turned the font size down one notch on C.E. Unfortunately, I no longer consider Nobeltec usable due to their file installation procedures and limitations. They have always been clunky anyway, sometimes requiring deleting and reinstalling charts, when a newer version was installed. This is unfortunate, as except for a few glitches when they brought in some outside code in v5, and their initial attitude towards BSB4 in v 7, I have been happy with the product. One additional note - the license terms on CE are great. They permit one offboat copy,and as many copies as needed on your (one) boat. So you can legally have a backup computer on the boat, and a copy at the office or at home as well. If you buy the Maptech package, they limit you to two installations. Theoretically one on the boat, and one at the office for planning (when you are supposed to be working;-), but no backup on the boat, unless you bring your office/home copy with you. Go figure. Happy Charting Dave L. T'III Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com