
#Sailboat anemometer software
In addition to using the Maretron displays for monitoring windshifts, Agnew integrated the wind data into his laptop, which was running Nobeltec navigational software, and MaxSea tactical software from Furuno. It took me about twenty-five minutes to hook up the first sensor (at the top of the rig), ten minutes for the second, and five seconds for the third.” “We installed two Maretron screens, one above the companionway, and one down below in the nav station.
#Sailboat anemometer install
“I was emboldened to install it myself because of the simplicity and logic of the system,” says Agnew. He did the installation himself, although he’d never done that type of installation before. “Measuring the time of flight in both directions between a pair of transducers allows the speed of sound to be cancelled out of the calculation, making the wind speed computation independent of air temperature and relative humidity.”Īlex Agnew navigated the Swan 40 Chase in the 2006 Newport Bermuda Race using the system. Such compact systems are commonplace on powerboats and the major concern has always been whether the systems would work on a raceboat.Īccording to Anderson, wind blowing in the direction of flight of a pulse increases the speed of the pulse by the amount of the windspeed. Those bring the corrections for the true component of the wind that you need and want.” Any system that’s capable of reading NMEA 2000 messaging, he tells us, can use this data. “The information from our WSO 100 sensor feeds information directly to a NMEA 2000 backbone, which also has compass, GPS, and speed information. Will this technology benefit racing sailors? “Absolutely”, says Maretron’s VP, Larry Anderson. Consider them as masthead weather stations. Using sonic technology, these units provide accurate information about wind direction and speed, as well as barometric and temperature information. But two companies, Maretron and Airmar, have developed wind speed/direction sensors that use no moving parts.

Broken vanes, missing cups, and wands tweaked off centerline are the stuff we’ve long had to deal with to get the wind data we need. When you have a delicate instrument with moving parts spinning around at the top of your rig, there are bound to be numerous trips aloft to replace bits and pieces of your wind direction/speed sensor in its lifetime. Windspeed and direction are measure by sonic pulses passing between the sensors (explained in the diagram below).| If the GPS speed and heading jump around, it causes True Wind Direction and Speed to jump around too.| The Maretron WSO 100 delivers wind data without the cups and moving parts of a traditional masthead anemometer. That means there is a circle around your location with a diameter of 80 feet (26 meters), within which GPS technology is not accurate enough to know if you are moving. That phantom movement enters the calculations for True Wind Direction and Speed, making them unreliable when not moving. The problem is that GPS is only accurate to within say 40 feet (13 meters) on the face of the earth.

But sometimes even then you may notice that a navigation app reports that you have a boat speed of 1-3 knots, as the GPS tries to detect your position. The Limits of GPS Accuracy for True Wind: When you are not moving, it is always best to use Apparent Wind Direction and Speed, not True. To avoid the need to buy compass hardware to mount on the boat, we use your GPS heading to derive wind angle. So if the boat is not moving, Wind Angle should not be displayed. But if you are displaying Wind Angle, that is relative to the boat’s heading. Direction: If you are displaying Wind Direction then wherever the arrow is pointing is what you see on screen.
