Hi Matt,

A couple of days ago I noticed that my HDS12 Gen3 no longer showed any of my Reefmaster charts. I then fired up my old HDS10 Gen2, and it had the exact same problem. Very strange, but I didn't have time to look at it more at the time.

What I remember, the last time I used the units they both showed the charts ok. After that I beleive I only have updated the firmware, but I am not 100% sure.

Now I have been testing it more thoroughly though, on the bench, and my only conclusion is that it is the Atlas description that causes the problem. This problem occurs in both the HDS unit and in the Insight Planner application, and only when I am using non ASCII characters in the name. However, Reefmaster allows for these characters!
Also, looking into the AT5 file header, it confirms my suspicions.

So what’s the deal here? Does the Atlas description only support ASCII, or should it handle full UTF8?

//Mats

On the data side, At5 Version >= 12 is Plane 0 UTF-8 compliant (including the description string). Anything prior to 12 is restricted to Win-1252.

Hmmm, I have been testing Atlas version 10, 12 and 13, and I did not notice any difference in the behavior.

The thing is that ReefMaster is using the ReefMaster project name as default input to both the AT5 project and Atlas description string. And as I am using Swedish characters in the ReefMaster project name, this is what I get by default, and that is not working. But if I interchange the "Å Ä Ö" with A's or O's then it works like a charm.

But it sounds very unlikely that I am the only one having this problem.
Why haven't this issue popped up rather quickly after the ReefMaster 2.0 release?
Have anyone else experienced similar problems with local characters?

//Mats

Thanks for the heads up Mats - this is the first that I have heard of this problem, and I must admit that we haven't tested thoroughly with non-ASCII characters in those fields - the IMC documentation states unicode compliance from Atlas v12 onwards. It would, I suppose, be possible for us to limit the characters that are included in the description and project name, but for now all I can suggest is ensuring that you don't use non ASCII characters.

ASCII characters will do just fine!

I just wanted to share my findings, so that other users will be aware of this possible situation, since it's not that obvious what is going on. I was honestly quite frustrated myself before I figured it out ;-)


Have a nice evening Matt