TimeZero installation, licensing and setup in Busan

TimeZero replaces the paper-and-guesswork layer of a bridge with a single PC-based chart and fishing picture, and it only earns that place if the sensor data feeding it is clean. NAVION is a TimeZero dealer for Asia and installs, licences and commissions TimeZero Professional and Navigator on vessels alongside in Busan. Most of our TimeZero work happens in Gamcheon fishing port and the Yeongdo repair yards, where a boat has a fixed number of hours before it sails, and the software has to be working, licensed and understood by the crew before the gangway comes off.

An installation starts with the hardware the software will live on. We check that the workstation has the CPU, RAM and dedicated graphics TimeZero actually needs for radar overlay and 3D PBG rendering, that the display resolution matches the chart scale the crew works at, and that power comes from a supply that survives generator changeover. Underpowered PCs are the single most common cause of a TimeZero installation being blamed for lag or freezing when the software is fine. If the vessel supplies its own PC we tell you before we start whether it will carry the workload, rather than after.

Licence handling is where port-call jobs most often go wrong, so we handle it as a distinct step. We activate new licences, transfer existing licences from a failed or retired PC, and register the correct modules so the features the vessel paid for are actually enabled: PBG, radar, weather routing, sounder interfacing. Licence operations need internet access, which on many vessels means the satcom terminal or a shore SIM; we plan that in advance and carry offline activation as a fallback rather than discovering the problem with two hours left alongside.

Charts are the next layer. We install and update MapMedia raster and vector catalogues, including the coverage a vessel needs for its actual trading area rather than a default set, and check that C-MAP or Navionics licences are bound to the right dongle or machine ID. Chart libraries are large; where possible we bring updates on prepared media so the transfer does not depend on ship bandwidth.

Interfacing is the technical core of the job. TimeZero is only as good as the NMEA 0183 and NMEA 2000 sentences arriving at it: GNSS position, heading from the gyro or satellite compass, speed through water and over ground, depth, wind, AIS, and rate of turn. We wire and configure serial ports, USB-to-serial converters and Ethernet gateways, set baud rates and talker IDs, and verify each sentence in the data monitor instead of assuming the port is alive. Heading source and its latency are checked specifically, because a bad or slow heading is what makes a radar overlay smear and drift off the coastline. Radar overlay is then aligned against known targets and fixed marks, and the antenna offset from the GNSS antenna entered so targets sit where they should.

For fishing vessels the PBG configuration matters as much as the chart. We set transducer draft and offset, apply sounder and tide corrections, choose sensible grid resolution for the ground being worked, and check that logged data builds a coherent seabed rather than stepped artefacts caused by a wrong offset. On multi-workstation vessels we set up the network so wheelhouse and skipper stations share marks, tracks and PBG data, and define which machine is the master.

Before we leave we back up user data — marks, tracks, routes, catch objects, PBG database, workspace layouts and interface settings — to media the vessel keeps, so a PC failure at sea is a restore and not a total loss. Then we sit with the bridge team and walk through the workspaces they will actually use, in plain terms, including how to restore that backup themselves.