Monday, January 15, 2018

Shortcut to NGA Publications

The primary link to NGA publications is a long one that some browsers stumble on, so we created this custom link that goes directly to this important list of navigation publications. Use: 


Capitalization does not matter; you can use /ngapubs. 

Here are the pubs available at that link:

American Practical Navigator
Atlas of Pilot Charts
Chart No. 1
Distances Between Ports
International Code of Signals
NGA List of Lights
Radar Navigation and Maneuvering Board Manual
Radio Navigational Aids
Sailing Directions Enroute
Sailing Directions Planning Guides
Sight Reduction Tables for Air Navigation
Sight Reduction Tables for Marine Navigation
USCG Light List
World Port Index

Or, you can go directly with this one:

https://msi.nga.mil/NGAPortal/MSI.portal?_nfpb=true&_st=&_pageLabel=msi_portal_page_62

The actual link you see seems to depend on how you got there.  It is marked as a secure page (https), but it is not secure. This is the strange situation we see with many NGA and Navy pages.

LATEST and BEST update... I think.

We have found that 



will do the job. Don't use www, or anything else. Just type that in the url and hit enter.  Then select Publications link on the left.

4 comments:

Martin Gardner said...

David, you said " [the nga link] is marked as a secure page (https), but it is not secure. This is the strange situation we see with many NGA and Navy pages."

Can you shed any more light on this? I used to be able to access the NGA pubs, but my modern Safari Browser on Mac now issues dire warnings. I tried the same pages at my library computer, running Chrome on a PC - same dire warnings. I reported this to NGA, but their only response was to suggest loading Bowditch pages directly rather than via the tree - but that produces the same dire warnings..

David Burch said...

I do not understand the details of these issues. I can note that many times i cannot get into a Navy site at all with Chrome on a Mac, but can get to it with Firefox on same Mac. So the issue these days is having several browsers at hand. A related issue at the moment is downloading Coast Pilots from https://www.nauticalcharts.noaa.gov/publications/coast-pilot/index.html My experience now is their coding is not at all browser independent. with some browsers there is text overlaying the image map so there is no way to download the books in chrome on a mac. when it is working right, you see a nice clean map that responds to mouse location in others there is text overlaying the map.

back to the navy / NGA issues, in all cases i have had to look at advanced options and then say OK to go there.

by the way, does our short link work for you? if not, try Firefox. thanks.

Martin Gardner said...

David,

Your short link does work on Safari, with the dire warnings. At your suggestion, I tried Firefox, which issues the same dire warnings, but offers a simpler bypass than Safari. I was able to download both Bowditch volumes as PDF's. (I was also able to access the Coast Pilot page in your reply and display CP 7 as an html page, but Firefox did not offer a PDF download option.)

It's a pity that access to all this effort is crippled by webpage problems.

David Burch said...

Yes, we have seen that trick work on some NOAA websites. But we have just yesterday found another solution for NGA, which i will add to the article. thanks for your note. ie try msi.nga.mil and then use the Publications link on the left.