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Jon TC

Sunlight-Viewable Monitor

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I have been on a mission for a few years to get SailTimer to read the information from my existing wind instrument instead of purchasing their proprietary unit. Finally, thanks to the Kickstarter-funded iKommunicate (which I found out about from Panbo :-) ), I can now see my on-board wind data in Sailtimer on my iPad.

But there is still a problem. SailTimer blythely advertises "Tacking Time to Destination (TTD)", but that claim is somewhat misleading, at least as I see it. If my "destination" is a single waypoint, yes, Sailtimer will calculate the best tacks, and change them as the wind changes. But as a practical matter, most of my cruising "destinations" are at the end of routes which comprise several waypoints, so to get the tacking time to what I would call "my destination", I would have to sum the tacking times of each individual leg, and even then, I'd have to go back and re-do that sum if the wind changed!

I queried SailTimer and the answer was that they didn't know of anyone who had done the programming (a daunting task they said) to be able to give the time to the final waypoint in a route. I didn't point out that that is what Google Maps does when they give a person several route choices, but I did mention that my SailCruiser program from NavSim does that very nicely.

I was happy with NavSim, but the problem was that I couldn't see the display in sunlight at the helm when I mirrored my laptop display to a Panasonic MDWD (Mobile Data Wireless Display). But I am back at the point of thinking that a monitor at the helm is my best option (it just needs to be wireless and sunlight-readable), so I can run the NavSim program at the nav station and see all of my tacks displayed at once. I thought this monitor might be a good option http://www.tru-vumonitors.com/images/SRM-10.4B-WRL_Sunlight-Readable_LCD_Monitor.pdf but they say it must be connected with a VGA cable. So my question to Ben and the Forum, as the people most familiar with marine products on the market and planned to be, is: do you know of a wireless sunlight-viewable (1000+ nits) monitor, preferable in the 8-10 inch size range?

Or, as is very possible, am I overlooking something I should have thought of?

1 Reply

  • RE sunlight viewable display: I bot a Panasonic PDRC display. Expensive at retail but I found a returned one. 1200 nits. 12"