3/5/2023 0 Comments Sailboat anemometerLike Agnew, Peterson uses MaxSea routing software. He says it was a relatively simple install for them, and took less than a day, and that included the masthead wiring and a depth sounder. Peterson installed the masthead system himself but had a dealer run the wiring. The final reason was price the system I purchased was much more affordable, especially because you don’t always have to replace moving parts.” I also liked the fact that there were no moving parts in the masthead system. ![]() When I bought the system, NMEA 2000 wasn’t all that popular, but I didn’t want to get stuck in somebody’s dedicated network, plus it was very easy to install. “One of the reasons I chose Maretron was the fact that it was running on NMEA 2000. “My boat had 20-year old B&G and I wanted to update,” says Peterson. Peterson has done the last two Bermuda Races and a lot of buoy racing with the WSO 100 sensor since installing it in 2006. This required a converter that translated the NMEA 200 data into NMEA 0183 data, but once that was up and running, everything worked fine, and according to Agnew, the data the routing software got from the windspeed/direction center was perfect.Īnother owner using a Maretron unit is Ray Peterson on his Swan 46 Cygne. 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. “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).| | The Maretron WSO 100 delivers wind data without the cups and moving parts of a traditional masthead anemometer.
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