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I'm sitting down below on Jaga, finishing a fine ale and listening to the BBC over wifi. The wind is howling, but it's nice and toasty inside. I'm monitoring whats going on outside on MacENC, connected to my instruments wirelessly via a bluetooth multiplexer and nmea.
What I'm wishing is that I could record the wind speed/direction rather than just note it when I look at it. Is there a piece of software that could take the nmea data stream and record the wind speeds, possibly putting it into a graph? Being able to do that with boat speed and maybe depth could also be interesting and possibly useful. Seems I've seen this somewhere but couldn't find it.
Just dreaming.
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MacENC does record the instruments Wind Speed and Angle in the Track log (assuming you have instruments interfaced to MacENC). You can see the instruments track data by enabling "Capture" and selecting "Instruments" on the "Track" menu.
http://www.gpsnavx.com/MacENC/help/track.htm
It's certainly possible to export the track log to a CSV file and import into MS Excel and make a graph.
There is some older software that will also graph wind..
http://www.laurence.com/rusalka/
Scott Dillon
Sydney Australia
North Shore 38
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I'm already aware that wind speed and angle are recorded in the track file, since I always record my track on one minute intervals. Since I'm not a sailor I don't care much about recording those values. What puzzles me is that water temperature stands alone among all of my instrument values in being excluded from the track file. It's a great way to spot gyres and current fronts. TMP is even shown in the instrument window, and it is the only value in that window that doesn't get recorded to the track file.
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While the original thread posting was about wind speed and angle being present in the Track log, thanks for pointing out the omission of the temperature field. It will be in the next release of both GPSNavX and MacENC.
Unfortunately adding new fields to the track export (CSV file) is difficult because it will break compatibility with older exported tracks.
Scott Dillon
Sydney Australia
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The software from Rusalka might work for what I'm after, but the purchase link doesn't work.
My original interest was stimulated last summer when I was holed up in an anchorage on the east 'shore of Hecate Strait, opposite the Queen Charlotte Islands (Larsen Harbour on the north end of Banks Island, to be exact.) I later learned from the Canadian Coastguard that Hecate is the 4th most dangerous body of water in the world (not sure how that's defined). It was blowing 50+ knots at the nearest weather buoy 10 miles away, and not much better in the anchorage, though it was otherwise well protected. I could monitor the wind speed on MacENC, but I really would have liked a realtime graph, similar to what is available for many of the US Weather buoys, of what the wind had been doing over the few hours, without having to do a export/import into another piece of software. This could also be useful when rising from sleep to see what had been happening during the night.
Having it in MacENC would be convenient, but I'm not sure that's the best use of Rich's time. A simple third party software that could take the nmea feed realtime and convert it into simple line graph would work. Wind speed and direction would be the primary interest, though some of the other data feeds could also be useful.
Scot
