# Menu items The Binnacle Chartplotter menu groups every chart action by intent. Optional features stay visible when unavailable and explain what provider, access, connection, or sensor is missing. Server-backed panels distinguish loading, retained-data refresh, empty results, and failure. Navigation output is advisory. Confirm the destination, route, chart coverage, weather age, tide source, and surrounding traffic before relying on it. ## Chart - **Center on boat** moves the chart to the latest vessel position. It is disabled while the chart is loading, before GPS is available, and when the last fix is stale. - **Follow boat** keeps the vessel centered until the chart is panned. A stale GPS fix only pauses recentering: Follow stays armed through the outage and resumes on the next fresh fix. While the chart is rotated (course-up or heading-up) and the boat is making way, Follow adds a bounded look-ahead that sits the boat low on screen so the water ahead gets the pixels. - **Orientation** cycles north-up, course-up, and heading-up. The launcher tile reads Orientation with the current mode on a quiet second line, and the bar pill shows the bare mode name, which flips on tap. North-up is the default; the rotating modes are explicit, profile-owned choices. Heading-up needs fresh true heading and course-up needs fresh COG with way on; a stale or missing reference falls back to north immediately. While a rotating mode is chosen, a status-strip chip keeps the live orientation and its reference (including the fallback) visible, and its N up action returns to north with one tap. Rotation gestures stay disabled; the mode is the only author of chart bearing, and the chart stays flat (never pitched). Zoom controls provide gloved-hand alternatives to pinch, and the compact labeled scale reports nautical distance. - Long press, right-click, the Context Menu key, and Shift+F10 open chart actions. Keyboard actions use the chart center. - **Layers and charts** opens to chart sources first. Signal K chart discovery can be retried without removing the last loaded sources. A broken source cannot stop the chart from opening. URL-backed PMTiles imports accept bounded HTTP or HTTPS URLs, validate metadata, and persist locally. Plain URLs may sync when Signal K writes are available. Every query-bearing URL defaults to device-only, and explicitly enabling sharing sends the complete URL to Signal K. Closing or superseding an import cancels its metadata request. User chart detail can stage a replacement URL, refresh the current URL's metadata, and change server sharing while retaining the chart id, visibility, opacity, and stack position. A failed replacement restores the accepted chart. Overlays remain in their own tab with visibility, opacity, management, and stacking controls. Signal K style-document sources remain listed with details available for inspection, but they are disabled, forced off, and identified as unsupported instead of appearing as blank charts. Chart overlays under **Chart overlays and marks** include seabed infrastructure (power cables, telecom cables, pipelines, and wind farms), maritime jurisdiction lines, and protected areas. All default hidden; the infrastructure layers exist for anchoring decisions, since a submarine cable or pipeline is no-anchor ground. The ambient chart badge on the map corner grades the current view from these layers: server and user charts count through their own bounds, and the NOAA ENC counts as a nautical chart through its actual regional coverage list rather than its near-worldwide service envelope, so mid-ocean still reads Outside chart coverage. Bathymetry references (GEBCO, EMODnet, BlueTopo, Seascape) never flip the badge: they carry no aids to navigation and are not reduced to chart datum. Tapping the badge opens this panel. When no nautical chart is on, the Charts tab says so at the top and states that depth shading does not count as a chart, and a line beside Add a chart sets expectations outside US waters. In US waters with no chart on, a dismissible chart-corner banner offers to turn NOAA ENC on, graded against the boat's own fix and NOAA's published regional coverage, and it stays quiet while a panel is open. - **Offline charts** stays visible without Chart Locker and explains installation, startup, access, and chart-loading requirements. It manages saved areas, automatic caching, installed charts, and storage. The installation probe distinguishes a missing plugin, refused access, and a service or network failure. The access-needed header status opens Signal K administrator sign-in directly. Return to Binnacle after signing in; Chart Locker retries automatically. If Signal K already reports an administrator session, a Chart Locker refusal is shown as an access error with retry instead. Accepted saved-area downloads recover by area identifier when the immediate job response is lost. Repeated status failures offer Retry status without starting another download. Removed chart sources are labeled, existing cached coverage is preserved, and re-download stays blocked until an adjusted copy uses available sources. Saved-area cards lead with an at-a-glance summary: plain detail level, chart count with any unavailable ones, and the approximate span in nautical miles. While navigating a route, an advisory route-coverage check samples a chosen 1, 5, or 10 nautical-mile corridor (the route line and both edges) against the ready saved areas, the catalog coverage of their included charts, and a requested detail level; it reports Complete, Partial, or Unknown, highlights uncovered and insufficient-detail stretches read-only on the chart, clears with the route, and states that it does not certify navigation or passage safety. Provider readiness stays a separate readout. See the [Offline charts guide](offline-charts.md) and the Offline charts section in the [README](../README.md#offline-charts-chart-locker-and-ssl-optional). ## Navigate - **Routes** loads Signal K route resources independently of the live WebSocket. Creating, editing, importing, reversing, deleting, activating, stopping, skipping, and chart-side route actions require write access. Route activation, stopping navigation (in the panel and on the navigation strip), and chart-position navigation require confirmation. Failed refreshes keep the last accepted list and offer Retry. Secondary card actions live in a labeled overflow menu, which also carries Rename route and a read-only passage plan: the same leg table, planned arrivals, plan speed, and departure the edit session shows, reviewable without entering chart edit mode, with a link to check the route's offline chart coverage. Saving from the panel offers to start navigation on the route just drawn, using the same confirmation. The strip's Save is a quick save under the working or dated name, which Rename can change afterward. On a server with no routes resource provider the panel names the one-time Resources Provider step with a Check again action. Route ids, names, geometry, and collection size are bounded before use. GPX imports accept at most 5 MB, 100 encountered routes, and 10,000 encountered route points. Malformed coordinates are skipped, but their records still count toward the limits. - **Waypoints** loads standard Signal K waypoint resources, supports chart drops, edits, deletes, location, and confirmed navigation. Navigation sends the waypoint's resource reference so the destination name reaches the navigation strip and other stations. The panel searches name and description ignoring case and accents, sorts by name, distance, or bearing with fresh-fix-only metrics, and states its render and ingestion caps. Locate and a confirmed navigation start both collapse the phone panel so the chart and the guidance strip stay visible, and failed loads offer Retry. The chart drop dialog also offers Save and navigate, which saves the mark and arms the same destination-naming confirmation; plain Save stays primary and edit mode never offers it. On a server with no waypoints resource provider the panel names the one-time Resources Provider step with a Check again action instead of blaming the connection. See [Waypoints](waypoints.md). - **Tracks** records a continuous local track and manages saved Signal K track resources. GPS gaps remain gaps, server mutations update the UI immediately, and route conversion uses only the latest continuous segment. Retrace requires confirmation, and failed resource loads offer Retry without a startup toast. A server with no tracks resource provider is detected, Save is disabled, and the panel names the one-time Resources Provider step with a Check again action. See [Tracks](tracks.md). - **Playback** reviews bounded 1-hour, 6-hour, 24-hour, and 7-day ranges from one available history provider. Each range has a fixed adaptive resolution and row cap. The range-owned track, scrubbed marker, and four-metric readout share the same accepted provider snapshot. Play and pause offer Slow, Normal, and Fast (0.5x, 1x, and 2x) speeds, pause when the document is hidden, and stay disabled for reduced motion. Loading, no-provider, empty, and failed states are distinct. A failed range retains and correctly labels the accepted range, Retry repeats the failed request, and Latest moves to its newest loaded sample without another network query. Tracks records the boat's own breadcrumb trail; Playback reviews the server's recorded history. The two do not cross-link to a specific moment: a saved track resource carries its geometry, distance, and timespan, but not the clock time of its points (they are reconstructed with a zero timestamp), so there is nothing to seek Playback to. Reviewing a saved passage at its own time would first require persisting point times in the track resource. - **Find places** searches chart notes and places, including cached offline results. The layer row for the same data is named Places, so one noun covers the panel, the pill, the toolbar action, and the overlay. Loading, zoom limits, hidden layers, empty results, offline cache, and provider failure remain distinct. Its direct Show places on chart control uses the same visibility state as Overlays. See [Find places](find-places.md). - **Measure** arms chart taps for rhumb-line distance and true bearing. Points can be selected through a 44 px chart target or the strip, moved deliberately by drag, chart tap, or chart-center keyboard workflow, deleted, and restored through operation-based Undo. The strip shows both legs adjacent to a selected point, while collision-managed chart labels show distance only above a bounded zoom. Clear confirms, nested Escape cancels movement before ending Measure, route editing is excluded in both directions, and selecting Measure again preserves current work. See [Measure](measure.md). ## Safety - **Nearby vessels (AIS)** carries a live count of danger-grade collision contacts on its menu entry, and a named contact on the collision strip opens that vessel's detail here directly. It searches reported names and Maritime Mobile Service Identity numbers, filters collision risks and getting-close targets, then renders up to 500 matches by distance, closest point of approach (CPA), or name. A list row or generous chart hit target opens the same live in-panel detail, and the selected chart target gains a ring below the collision styling. Stale or absent own GPS removes derived distance and bearing instead of showing frozen values. An expired selected target returns to the live list instead of freezing its values. The panel labels a disconnected Signal K stream, shows collision severity, and exposes target identity, position, course, heading, speed, CPA, time to closest point of approach (TCPA), navigation state, and a plain-language ship type with the reported numeric id. - **Radar** stays discoverable without a provider and explains what is missing. Controls report radar identity, control-write state, spoke-stream health, renderer health, and stale pictures. Transmit requires confirmation, Standby stays immediate, complete native zones, no-transmit sectors, and rectangles have atomic form and chart editors, and Open overlay settings moves directly to the Overlays view. See [Marine radar](marine-radar.md). - **Anchor watch** prefers the Signal K Anchor API and falls back to a browser-only watch. A fresh GPS fix is required to drop. Lost GPS makes browser drag detection visibly degraded, while a server watch remains active independently. A browser watch whose GPS fix stays lost for about 30 seconds sounds the anchor tone and shows an "Anchor watch: no GPS" strip with per-episode Acknowledge (which re-arms when the fix returns) and Raise. A stream reconnect's stale server state is reported as "Anchor watch state is stale: reconnecting to the server." only after about 5 seconds and is never worded as a GPS loss. Server-mode changes require write access; client-mode changes stay available. Conflicting actions are locked until completion. - **Man overboard** raises the boat-wide alarm through the Notifications API with a v1 delta fallback. A raise or clear lost to a closed socket is replayed on reconnect, the MOB strip warns when the boat-wide alarm may not have reached the server, and the confirm dialog qualifies its every-station promise while writes are blocked. - **Alarms** lists bounded, validated Signal K notifications by severity, and its menu entry carries the live count of raised generic alarms. Any inbound alarm or emergency grade notification outside the dedicated hazards sounds a shared tone and raises a safety strip offering Silence, Acknowledge, Mute here, and Open Alarms; within those two grades the notification method field is honored with an audible-safe default, warn and alert grades stay visual by design, and a device-local mute never swallows a newly raised alarm. Silence and acknowledge are locked while pending and require server write access. A disconnected stream is labeled because displayed alarm state may be stale. Collision warnings publish as visual-only Signal K deltas, while danger alarms use the Notifications API with visual and sound methods. Collision and shallow-water settings stay in safe numeric bounds, in SI internally, with conversion only at display inputs. The shallow threshold merges the server's depth zones with the locally configured limit conservatively: whichever bound is deeper governs, so the server can tighten the alarm but never quietly loosen it. The panel names which one is in force and says when no depth source is publishing. Alarm audio is reported where an alarm lives, not in the status strip: the Alarms and Anchor watch panels state the grade (blocked until this display is tapped, failed to start, or unavailable on this display), and the Help setup checklist carries it as a row. Any tap or key anywhere primes the audio, so the blocked grade clears itself in ordinary use. The strip stays a readout row: a browser-permission condition is not a helm reading, and on a boat with nothing audible armed a standing chip claimed a silence that could not happen while costing the readouts a wrapped row. One alarm sounds at a time through a single audio authority: man overboard and an escalating collision danger interleave at the top, lower alarms rotate with bounded reminders, and courtesy tones yield. - **Watch handoff** takes a timestamped review-status snapshot for the change of watch: fix and source age, course with cross-track error and a basis-qualified time to go, raised alarms and the collision mute expiry, the top CPA and TCPA contact with assessment health, depth watch state, radar health, weather and tide ages, whether the active route's offline coverage was checked, and a short operator note. Snapshots share between stations through Signal K applicationData (global scope); when that store is unreachable they queue on the device and sync on reconnect, and every record states whether it is shared, waiting to sync, or on this device only. Facts are rendered at snapshot time so stale inputs read as stale, taking a snapshot mutates nothing (no acknowledgments, no navigation changes), and the surface reviews status; it never declares it safe to take watch. ## Weather - **Forecast** opens a weather mini-map at the navigation chart view. Wind and waves start visible on a fresh install. Cached data is labeled with source and fetch time, stale data remains visible, and a manual Retry bypasses automatic backoff after a failed fetch. Conditions at the boat require a fresh GPS fix. Provider point requests are time-bounded, warning intervals are validated, and missing optional warning labels receive bounded fallbacks. Open-Meteo marine fields are omitted when the provider's sea-snapped coordinate is too far from the requested grid cell. Provider warnings state when warning data is unavailable or cached. The routes shown on the chart draw read-only over the forecast with their named waypoints; they are not offered as a weather layer, cannot be edited there, and never imply the forecast was routed along the path. - **Tides and currents** independently selects tide-height and tidal-current stations. Automatic mode is the session default, prefers signalk-tides for tide height, and uses NOAA CO-OPS as the US-waters fallback and current source. Up to eight NOAA stations of each kind are listed within the supported radius. A manual choice fetches that exact NOAA station, survives chart pans for the session, and can be reset independently or together with **Use nearest stations**. Straight-line distance from the chart center is guidance only and does not guarantee that a station represents local water movement. Filled tide markers, hollow current markers, and their loaded prediction labels are tappable by mouse or touchscreen; a station selection reveals the layer, opens the panel when needed, and expands a minimized panel. When chart markers overlap, the highest visible overlay owns the gesture. Cached readings, accepted station choices, provider attribution, and nearby catalogs survive a failed replacement, and **Retry** bypasses the automatic cooldown. A valid empty response reports that no predictions are in the current window. The station lists only report that none is nearby once a search has actually finished; before one starts, while one runs, or after one fails, the panel explains the real reason instead of making a claim about the water. Provider station and event payloads are validated and bounded, and CO-OPS station identifiers are constrained before URL construction. Choices are not persisted across reloads. ## Instruments - **Instrument dock** opens the live instrument tiles. Each tile leads with its loud abbreviation (SOG, HDG, AWS) over the quiet long name, states render as tinted chips (Alarm outranks Stale, and Stale outranks a zone Warning computed from the untrusted value), a stale tile keeps its retained number at muted contrast with its age on the secondary line, and the wind tile's angle freshness folds into the same chip line. Customize can show, hide, and reorder tiles, including bounded discovered batteries, engines, tanks, solar controllers, and cabin sensors. A Rescan checks the live Signal K model first. When a registered history provider is available, it also checks the preceding year for concrete paths that populated under `vessels.self`, so seasonal equipment can be configured while stopped. Previously recorded readings stay selectable and visibly marked until live data arrives. Binnacle never presents a stored sample as a current reading. Dynamic labels identify both the reading and its source, such as RPM ยท Port engine, and the Customize list automatically disambiguates any future repeated label. An absent or failed provider leaves live discovery working and reports the reduced scan. An intentionally empty selection explains how to add a tile. Duplicate, invalid, and oversized saved selections are normalized. Each tile's detail names the live Signal K source of the shown value, and on watch-critical paths a bounded recent-source trace adds a cue: Source changed with the prior label, or Multiple recent sources when they alternate, within a ten-minute window. Each path traces alone, so unlike references (magnetic versus true heading) are never compared, and a reconnect starts the trace fresh. When two or more sources fed the shown path within that window, a Recent sources list names each source with its own formatted value and age, neutrally and without judging disagreement. Staleness honors the server first: a path the server declares timed out under its meta.timeout reads Stale (server declared) with the last good value retained and aged from its own receipt, and the detail names the source that went quiet. Because the server declares staleness per source, a declaration for a source other than the one feeding the shown value never marks the path. A path's explicitly declared meta.timeout also replaces the ten-second client staleness window on its tile, so a legitimately slow sensor is not flashed stale, and a declared timeout of zero means never stale. - **Data trends** shows zero to eight profile-owned instrument trends in saved order. Customize groups the available readings by category, supports touch and keyboard reordering, keeps unavailable saved selections removable, and disables a ninth addition without hiding it. Opening the panel discovers live dynamic instruments even when the Instrument dock has never opened. Rescan also checks registered history providers for previously seen readings and marks those without live data. Each chart resolves an ordered Signal K path fallback and one history provider without merging sources. A nonempty 24-hour history series wins per chart; otherwise the bounded, in-memory session recorder is used. That session window does not survive reload, and an unselected focused instrument starts recording only when its focused chart opens. Provider checking, partial failure, total failure, true empty history, session fallback, and no samples remain distinct. Every chart identifies its provider, path, and reference and includes a touch and keyboard timeline scrubber plus a textual latest, minimum, maximum, start, and end summary, and a data-coverage line (percent of samples present, longest gap, newest sample's age, marked Partial or Stale when warranted) that is visible and read by screen readers. Eligible instrument details can open one focused trend without changing the saved overview. Back restores the same detail and focus, while Close returns to the chart. - **Instrument dashboard** opens the installed KIP webapp in a new tab; the tile's quiet second line names both the acronym and the new tab. Transport or access failures keep its availability in the checking state instead of claiming KIP is absent. A blocked pop-up produces a visible message. ## Settings - **Profiles** (tile subtitle: units, sync, and privacy) saves portable chart, weather, threshold, toolbar, instrument, Data trends, track, unit-fallback, planning, chart-orientation, and preferred anchor-radius settings. The active profile saves automatically after a short debounce. Each device keeps its own active choice, while profiles and the default sync through the authenticated Signal K account. A remote change to the active profile is offered for explicit application or rejection so the chart does not change underneath the navigator; the prompt names the setting categories that differ, and the profile switcher in the top bar carries an update indicator so the offer is discoverable without opening the panel. The browser persists the last-applied setup separately, so an unresolved update survives reload. Imports are size-limited, deeply validated, bounded, and report the number saved. Profile names, ids, settings, timestamps, list sizes, journals, and server documents are validated before merge. Without server write access, edits remain queued locally, and delete confirmation warns that a server copy may remain. The panel reports Local, Waiting, Syncing, Synced, Conflict, and Error states, offers Retry, and keeps secondary card actions in a labeled overflow menu that flips and clamps within a narrow viewport or scrolled panel. Device privacy actions can forget only the local Signal K token or erase Binnacle-owned local settings, caches, IndexedDB data, profiles, and credentials. Full erasure is blocked while safety or unsaved navigation work is active and never deletes or revokes server data. Synced profiles return after sign-in and sync, while unsynced profiles and edits are permanently lost. Profile writes are suspended during erasure so queued work cannot recreate local data. See [Profiles and settings](profiles.md). - **Help** opens the permanent help panel: the safe-use framing (an advisory chartplotter, not a navigation chart), a live Get set up checklist (nautical chart on, GPS position seen, read and write access, alarm sound, and server saved-data storage, each with one action, retiring itself once the durable rows pass), the reference-map-versus-charts distinction, Signal K access and alarm-sound setup with direct actions, what each connection state means, a When something looks wrong section covering staleness and unassessed AIS targets, a marine glossary including the Keel, Surface, and Xducer depth datums and Signal K itself, operating-context checklists for a coastal day, a night passage, and lying at anchor, and a reset for the chart hints. The first-run orientation banner reopens from here; dismissing it persists per device, and its Set up charts action opens the Charts tab. ## Toolbar and status strip - The bottom toolbar carries pinned actions, chosen by tapping tiles while customizing. The default set is Menu, Center, Follow, and AIS: the Menu opener sits in the bar because on a phone the top-bar hamburger is a cross-screen reach, and AIS keeps one Safety action thumb-reachable with its live collision-risk count. Pinning Menu hides the top-bar hamburger, so exactly one control named Menu exists at a time. Menu renders as a launcher tile only while customizing, since tapping a tile is the pin control. - Degraded status-strip chips explain themselves on touch: tapping the connection dot, the AIS chip, the depth chip, a radar-trouble chip, or either alarm-audio chip shows its explanation as a transient note above the strip. Waiting for GPS carries a Help action, and the anchor chip opens Anchor watch. A chip that carries an action keeps it on the same row as its label, never stacked beneath it, so one degraded state costs the chart one row and not two. - While the Signal K link itself is down or silent, the readouts that pause with it (GPS, speed, course, heading, and the depth watch) are subordinated so the strip presents one failure with one action. Radar health is excluded: it rides the radar provider's own stream, not this link.