Wout B wrote:

Kees is right, the wind instrument needs speed through the water. However,
speed over the ground would actually give you a more accurate true wind
speed/angle, as current does not affect it. There are 2 other alternatives:

Thanks, that is my opinion as well. The only introduced error using SOG
is when the boat's movement has a sideways component, since the
wind instrument will assume that all the boat's motion is forward, and
calculate a slightly wrong true wind speed & direction. I think this is
likely to be a smaller error (certainly in the areas I sail) than that
introduced by currents, and it can only be removed with a complex vector
subtraction - I wonder if anybody bothers to do this?

1. The Navman wind instrument accepts GPS SOG for true wind calculation.

One wind instrument is enough, thanks, especially since it talks nicely
to my AutoHelm :-)

2. With a (standard) Brookhouse NMEA multiplexer, you can "convert" the GPS
speed data to (faked) speed through the water (VHW sentence), with a simple
script that is loaded into the multiplexer. Feed the mux output into your
E85001 and your wind instrument is happy.

This is more interesting. At first I thought it would remove the need
for the E85001, but it doesn't appear to output SeaTalk, so I haven't
completely wasted my money on the E85001 :-)

I checked out your website, but didn't see any instructions regarding
the "simple script" you mention. Can I assume that this kind of
information would come with the unit if I order one? I am thinking of
the one with USB connection as well.

Option 2 is the cheapest and gives you a lot of other functions as well,
which may be useful for future use. I'm biased, of course :-).

Thank you, and thanks for being honest about your bias. Buying such a
unit will save me having to do it myself (if I could even remember how
to program a microcontroller - it's been many years!) :-)

Who.