Swallow Yachts Forum > Technical
Side-stepping the technical silos
Graham W:
Andy,
I have accumulated very nearly a complete Tacktick system since 2010, starting with their excellent wireless wind system. I have bought other Tacktick items over the years, mostly secondhand on eBay. A few years ago I found a refurbished Tacktick T122 NMEA transmitter and wired it up with my elderly Garmin GPS/fishfinder, so that everything talked to everything else, in all directions.
However, with the Garmin now well past its prime (dodgy electrical connections and not easily readable in sunshine or the wet), I needed something to replace its charting and depth sounding abilities. Hence the decision to get a Sailproof tablet with an accurate internal GPS and a brighter and larger screen. Also a secondhand Tacktick hull transmitter and depth transducer and a new Digital Yacht WLN10 multiplexer. By wiring the Tacktick NMEA transmitter to the WLN10, as you suggest, all the information that I want (charting, depth, wind, speed) appears on the tablet and even on my iPhone if needed. And any data generated by the Tacktick system (but not from the Sailproof) also appears on the Tacktick screens. Multiple system redundancy!
In addition to the NMEA Instruments app that you mention, it looks like a couple of charting apps (qtVlm and OpenCPN) can generate depth charts from NMEA data. Until I get back on the water, it’s difficult to know how timely and useful these would be. They also have programmable depth alarms, which may be more useful.
As a solo sailor most of the time, I now have access to more data than I can possibly absorb by myself. So one of my future tasks will be to remove the clutter of data sets that I don’t need from the default screens of whatever app(s) I end up using. Navision and Memory Map look like strong contenders at the moment. OpenCPN (Android only) and qtVlm also look interesting but in need of a degree of quite complicated customisation. qtVlm can monitor in excess of 20 different variables at the same time - see the attached. This is probably marvellous if you have a full time navigator on your large yacht but it just confuses me!
Graham W:
--- Quote from: Timothy W on 31 Dec 2022, 15:15 ---Thanks for this post. It answers a number of questions for me. When you’re finished, please post a picture of how you mounted the tablet and other displays.
--- End quote ---
It may take a while!
AndyB:
Hi,
I must of misread your post that you could not get data into the Tacktick system so apologies for teaching you to suck eggs. You can go frpm the tablet if you use a particular package such as open-cpn as the multiplexers can receive as well as send data. Not sure what data you would send apart from say route info to say a tiller pilot.
When you have the tablet please let me know what apps it comes with.... If you need a testbed I can provide a windows executable which sends out NMEA data on a wifi channel - I have data from a real trip. Could take the place of the transducers....
Anyway apologies once again.
Andy B
Graham W:
Thanks Andy.
Graham W:
To give some idea of sunlight-readability, attached a photo of my old iPad (on the left) compared to the Sailproof, both running Navionics at maximum brightness in direct sunlight.
In its day (2016), the iPad had the brightest screen going at 511 nits. It still looks good indoors as it has quite high resolution but its battery is failing and it's probably not worth saving. The Sailproof has a lower resolution screen than the iPad but is considerably brighter at 1000 nits.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version