Advice on instruments

[Dockhead]

Originally Posted by Mal Reynolds

6. Instruments really come into their own at night when you can't see the waves. I find I have little natural sensory input on wind direction or strength as apparent wind vary significantly with sailing angles. Instruments tell you what's going on instantly in the dark, even with current.

Excellent point

[Dockhead]

Originally Posted by Andrew Lippman

. . . If I weren't setting up for racing, and therefore wedded to B&G, I would strongly consider a modular, wireless suite of sensors (depth, speed, wind, radar, AIS) that worked with an app rather than a dedicated unit. Redundant, more futureproof, good at home and at sea. Plus it's incremental -- buy each piece in turn. I never had trouble finding enough shade to read the iPad. A few dedicated readouts give you sailing data, the computer does nav.. . .

I'm a little confused about what you're saying here. Anything which is NMEA2000 is by definition "modular", and can be connected with different kinds of devices and can work with a plethora of apps. Likewise with older NMEA0183 transducers. Transducers requiring a dedicated display more or less disappeared at least 20 years ago.


You can easily make an NMEA2000 network wireless with a wifi bridge of some kind or another, or almost all modern MFD's have wifi built in.



Your H5000 has several different ways to connect to a computer. I connect mine with the Ethernet port.


Radar is the only thing which doesn't work over a standard network, but even that has been hacked by the OpenCPN developers who give you a plug-in to operate most modern radar sets from your computer.

[Andrew Lippman]

Sorry to be confusing. I am not up on the latest, but I think individual, stand-alone sensors are becoming available. These either use local WiFi or perhaps NMEA2K but are not associated with an installed computer or MFD such as the H5000 or Furuno touch. On my last boats, things like the depth, speed, radar all were wired directly to the MFD or the plotter. That makes it required.

My point is that a radar/plotter is obsolete almost from the moment it is installed. It becomes last year's iPhone, functional but not up to date. They are also expensive in part because they are proprietary and for their daylight-readable display.

In practice, I mostly drive using TZ-iBoat on the iPad. It is upgraded regularly, I can swap in a new iPad cheaply. It's not hard to read and it is far more responsive than any chart plotter. I can get AIS on it from the boat's Wifi (I have a router), but I can't get radar from my B&G Halo. Plus, I can plot routes on the computer at home and they appear on the app via Furuno's cloud sync.

If it accepted boat sensors like depth, radar, etc as easily as it get AIS, I wouldn't need the B&G stuff except for race strategy. Expedition may solve that but I haven't looked at it yet.

It is vexing that these manufacturers lock you into their suite of equipment and don't interoperate.

WRT NMEA2000 as the network, it's fine with me. A great step forward.