Make sure you first read and understand the What is the S-63 protection scheme guide. This guide assumes you are familiar with all the terminology introduced in that guide.

Ordering data from an S-63 data provider requires you to send the User Permit of your Ecdis system to the data provider. How to obtain that User Permit depends on your role:

When you aren’t an S-63 system manufacturer

When you aren’t an S-63 system manufacturer, Luciad will take the role of manufacturer and provide you with a User Permit.

As S-63 system manufacturer, we must ensure that each system has a unique HW_ID. Seeing as we don’t actually create the system, we enforce this by:

  • Asking you to sign an S-63 addendum to the business term of your purchase agreement. By signing the addendum, you agree to accept responsibility for compliance with IHO S-63.

  • We deliver you a license which only works on a single system, and couple the HW_ID and User Permit to that license:

    • The license is an iButton. An iButton is a serial or USB hardware key that embeds LuciadLightspeed license information, and can only be used in a single system at a time.

    • An alternative is a license coupled to the MAC address of your S-63 system.

The User Permit for the system is contained in the license file. Open the license file, and look for the s63UserPermit property. This property specifies a 28-digit number as your user permit.

In order to view your S-63 data, you must use Cell Permit files created for the User permit in your license file. They must correspond to each-other, otherwise you cannot open your data.

When you are an S-63 system manufacturer

When you are an S-63 system manufacturer that wants to use Luciad software, your systems already have a HW_ID and you need to be able to pass that information to the Luciad software. In this case, you need to take the following steps:

  1. Sign an S-63 addendum to the business terms of your software purchase agreement with Luciad.

  2. Get the LuciadLightspeed license file from Luciad, and install it.

  3. Optionally, ask Luciad to include a specific "system id" in the license. This can be any string, chosen by you and will be available as s63CustomerSystemId property in the license.

  4. Create your own user permit using your own hardware ID and manufacturer identifier.

  5. Send the user permit to the data provider.

  6. Get the ordered S-63 data and cell permits from the data provider.

  7. Configure the encrypted hardware ID on the LuciadLightspeed decoders. See the API documentation of TLcdS63UnifiedModelDecoder#setEncryptedHardwareID for more information.

  8. When you asked for the Luciad license to contain a system id, you must call TLcdS63UnifiedModelDecoder#setS63CustomerSystemID with that ID before using the model decoders. See the method javadoc for more information.

  9. Now you can decode the S-63 data as explained here.

In this case, Luciad is not responsible for enforcing IHO S-63 compliance.