A Forum member asked me about downloading free charts from NOAA.  It turns out its pretty easy to do and they look great.  Nice to have the greater detail for passage making.  Here are the steps involved.

Click on the Charts ribbon and select RNCs .  In the popup window click NOAA RNCs.



In the OCS WEbpage pick which charts you want, You can pick a region or a state, or even the entire set (3+ GB).  I choose Region 12 - Southern California.  Click on List to get a description of what each region covers.  Make sure you click on the number or the state name - not View, that just gives you a big xml dump.




A zip file will be downloaded.  I created a new folder "Charts" under the Expedition Data folder.  C:\ProgramData\Expedition\Charts and unzipped the contents of the downloaded file to there.  It creates an extenisve folder structure with BSB_ROOT as its starting point.

Back in Expedition, in the open dialog, click on Search and navigate your way to the Charts folder previously created. Select the BSB_ROOT folder and press "Select Folder".  The charts will be loaded into the Expedition DB and you will see the list of available charts.  Pick the chart you need and hit Open.  You should see something like this:



Hope that helps.  They are great looking charts but they are quite a bit slower to use.  And probably more detail than you need for most tasks.  But great for piloting etc..