Anchor alarm

thinking about installing a anchor alarm not sure how to go about this any ideas like using a iPad

If you had a depth sounder it normally comes with an anchor alarm ith you can bracket with a high and low depth, so you are covered whether you are dragged into deeper or shalower waters.

Likewise mose GPS's have this as an option.

Looking at iNavx which I have on my ipad it has an anchor alarm option, though I have never used it ( Raymarine depth anchor alarm works fine for me).

So lots of options.

Ilenart

I like Sailsafe. You can set it after you've established your anchorage. All the other ones I came across you had to set the GPS coordinates when you dropped your anchor which I failed to do every time.

I use Anchor Watch for Android. I was so impressed with the free version that I bought the pro version just to give the developer a couple of dollars.

Download a few of the free ones that get good scores in the store. Keep the one you like.

Cheers

Bristol

I've got a copy of iSailor on an iPad (must be a 3g model with a gps chip for accuracy btw). It has a good anchor watch/alarm built into it. You can set the radius and alter it at any time. I usually set a tightish radius so it goes off and alerts me if the wind picks up significantly, then I'll increase the radius by 5-10 meters and I'm usually right for the night. I can also set an alarm on it for gps positioning too, so if it loses the satellites I get alerted.

I take it forward and set the alarm as soon as the pick hits the bottom, for the best accuracy. I sleep much better in a blow, with this system, now I've gotten used to it and have grown to trust it.

Whichever app you go with, check that it'll let you know if it looses the satellites, otherwise you could be dragging and woudn't know.

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Trek said..
Trek Transponder. Australian made. Logs boat location automatically and even if you are ashore it will ping your mobile phone if anchor drags.

Great system and so much more than just an anchor alarm

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crustysailor said..
It can give you some pretty erroneous distances from home though.

Then you wonder if the alarm generated is a false reading or if you really are dragging or come off the mooring.

This has not been my experience, although I guess any gps system is at the mercy of of the owner of the satellite system.

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crustysailor said..
It can give you some pretty erroneous distances from home though.

Then you wonder if the alarm generated is a false reading or if you really are dragging or come off the mooring.

Software upgrades are free plus postage. Your software is version B, its up to version G now. From version D onwards the GPS software was changed to require 5 consecutive loss of signal or "outside Geofence" before triggering alarm. This was to cover the users that get errors like that but still dont put an External Antenna on (as manual says to) and/or have the unit in cupboard pointing at the horizon and not up if they get GPS errors. Amazing though the unit is it does actually need a stable GPS signal to check distances around 5m-10m with 100% reliability, just like any other GPS. Did you get an external antenna, I cant remember?
BTW of interest to everyone who uses GPS. We test 5 or 10 at a time on our window sill. On the very odd occasion when there is a GPS signal error all 5 or 10 units get it at the same instant. ie. The error is from elsewhere and as UncleBob says we wonder why and how.

In any medium to major comms infrastructure project, we'll install as part of the build a NTP clock. Or in English, a black box with a GPS antenna that uses the atomic clock from satellites as the time source for all the various network connected doodads.
Prisons, airports, universities would all have as a minimum at least a master and physically separated failover NTP box solution, as THE master clock is an obviously critical piece of equipment.

The chipsets of choice for all the NTP server's was Trimble. For alarm purposes, we wrote code to poll the chipset for hello, synch drift, synch loss all that sort of thing, and in the process we found the Trimble chipsets would reboot every 24 hours.
????? Trimble supply 10's of millions of their chipsets to people like Garmin, US military, they are a quality chipset. We took lots of tests results and flicked them over to Trimble,
Imagine my surprise, when they came back and admitted quite openly that it was old code that was designed to reboot the chipset every 24 hours to mitigate drift! We asked if it could be removed from the code, as it was generating alarms every night when it rebooted. In facilities like prisons, that's not good for a critical alarm going off in the middle of the night.

Trimble did it all no problem, they are really good to work with. But I still cannot believe squillions of these same chipsets are out there, rebooting every 24 hours still, years after the reliability of sw improved where it is no longer flaky to at least not have pull the plug on it every day!
So, if you have a Trimble GPS chipset that you haven't firmware upgraded since 2006 (for that read nearly all of us) , you'll notice in debug error logs at least once every 24 hours a lost satellite comms link!!!
Behind the scenes of some black magic... still the good ol' reboot.

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Trek said..
Trek Transponder. Australian made. Logs boat location automatically and even if you are ashore it will ping your mobile phone if anchor drags.

Hi Trek,
I meant to ask you if your kit would handle existing cameras with an IP interface? It looks like analogue cameras in your pics? Cool idea btw.