On Thu, 1 May 2008 09:59:50 -0700 (PDT), cognisense
wrote:

I am evaluating autopilots for my CnC Landfall 48 sailboat, and the
Simrad has a feature not found in other pilots, which they call
WindNav - the ability to steer the boat to an angle of wind with an
eye towards a destination waypoint. The Simrad will allow you to tack
upwind and will suggest the tack point for the final lay line.

My belief is that navigation / pilots should provide functionality
which allows me to increase the amount of time my eyes are on the
water, and this feature strikes me as a good idea. However, none of
the other pilots I'm looking at offer this feature, nor, as best I can
tell, do any of the pc navigation software products nor integrated
chartplotters.

This begs the question: how useful is this feature?

I'd love to hear from people who have a Simrad installed on a
sailboat, and whether or not anyone uses this feature...

Thanks,

Keith

Raymarine (and their predecessor AutoHelm) pilots will steer by
apparent wind, provided you have an apparent wind indicator on the
SeaTalk network.

It's a long time since I switched from sail to power, so I don't
recall how well, this feature worked, as I usually preferred to steer
myself if there was enough wind to sail. The autopilot was primarily
used while motoring.

--
Peter Bennett, VE7CEI
peterbb4 (at) interchange.ubc.ca
GPS and NMEA info: http://vancouver-webpages.com/peter
Vancouver Power Squadron: http://vancouver.powersquadron.ca