SAILING INSTRUMENTS
Looking to upgrade your boat’s aging instruments? Here’s how to narrow your choices
Today’s electronics are not only more powerful than ever, but carefully tailored to match many different sailing styles
BBe it for safety, navigation or competition, all sailors have a need for information about their boat’s performance and its environment. Many recent advances have been made by marine electronics manufacturers, which have increased the accuracy, quantity and accessibility of data from electronic sailing instruments. A general understanding of how these devices gather, share and display their data is helpful when sorting through the myriad of options on the market.
Collecting Data
The fundamental sensors that make up any sailing instrument system include wind speed and direction, boatspeed, water depth and water temperature. These transducers detect variations in the physical world around the boat and convert that information into an electrical signal. Buying your transducers as part of a kit with instrument displays is a reliable way to make sure that everything is compatible. However, if you are attempting to integrate new and old equipment or use devices from more than one manufacturer, transducers should be selected carefully. Most transducers output an analog signal that must be converted to a digital data format by a dedicated instrument display, or alternatively a “black box” computer. It’s not until this conversion happens that the signal can be shared with other devices on a boat’s network. A growing trend is to have “smart transducers” that do the processing internally before outputting useful data onto the boat’s NMEA 2000 network.
Processing Data
Depending on your desired level of sophistication, the data that is provided to your instrument displays may need to be adjusted, averaged or offset in one way or another before it becomes useful to you. Much of this processing is overkill for cruisers. However, if you are solo-sailing on a performance boat through the Southern Ocean, your needs may be different. The latter scenario, for example, would call for an autopilot that can keep you on course in 20ft seas by adjusting its steering profile based upon critical data received from a central computer, which is constantly processing data from a wind transducer, hull speed transducer and probably a 3D motion sensor.