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Josh Assing Josh Assing is offline
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First recorded activity by BoatBanter: Jul 2006
Posts: 201
Default FluxGate compasses

As some of you know; I was looking at buying a sailboat -- well; the survey went
fine but the owner thanked me for sharing the results with him and has backed
out. I feel like I was used to get a 'free survey' -- so we're keeping our boat
& we'll keep looking.

One of the things I've long wanted to do was put a fluxgate compass on the boat
-- at slow speeds the gps "heading" tends to waiver -- which is not good in the
fog when I'm trying to coordinate ais data with the radar display (two seperate
units)

I seem to have 4 options
1) Really expensive compass (2,000+)
2) SimRad RFC35 ($400)
3) Nasa compass sensor (I have only found it in the UK for $170)
4) Azimuth 1000 ($300)

I like having a standard non-powered compass; but the azimuth is readily
avaliable and outputs nmea data.
I've read a lot about the simrad not being able to get usable nmea data out
So I think I"m going with the Nasa compass; unless someone has some thoughts.

Thanks
-josh