Sailboat racing application fixed race course navigation and starting assistance

I don't want to reinvent the wheel e.g. (1) and (2)

I'm sketching out a sailboat racing application for sailboat racing application for the type of racing I am use to at my club. The club uses a fixed curse with about 7 set marks. At the starting line, the course is called for some combination of those 7 marks. we do silver and gold series racing (in a perf race, each pref starts at a designated time with its perf fleet. In a pursuit race, each boat starts at a handicapped time set such that in theory they should all finish at the same time.)

The things we struggle with are:
Marks are about 2 miles apart and are hard to see. we are really bad at using handheld GPS while trying to race, especially when we have really active races.
countdown to starting time, particular in pursuit type races, is very hard to keep track of.
using handheld gps units for navigation is distracting and it takes too many steps to change GOTOs for each leg of the race.

so in theory the app I want to write to solve these challenges for racing will
Provide a race start assistance screen that will count down to the race start time, distance from the starting line, ETA to the starting line. stuff like that.
Provide an in-race mark application screen that is very easy to use. The course marks are in there, and by pressing arrow buttons up/down, you cycle through the marks to see for any mark: current heading, bearing to mark, distance to mark, current speed and a pointer
Provide a setup screen to configure the starting time for the countdown, magnetic declination, and download the course's details from some database on the internet (easy data entry).

Comments, suggestions, Am I reinventing anyone's wheel. Focus here is on very simple navigation with quick selection froma short list of waypoints with the few fields that are not readily accessible on the boat electricians

tommays56 over 9 years ago

A lot of the new Quatix 3 apps which run on the Fenix 3 cover a good bit of this BUT for what ever reason you cant navigate within the sailing app other than and MOB

You do get to ping the starting line and have the ability to sync the countdown and have a tack assist for lift/header

Its all a bit clumsy and a GPS 73 handheld provides more complete function at this point, are waypoints are not known until perhaps 20 minutes before and as we often finish in the dark we really need to use navigation

JLM999 over 9 years ago

It seems we spend so much effort on fussing around with our handheld GPS. It seems so silly to me because we sail on a course made up of about 6 marks that never move. So there are only six waypoints to choose from. And second, all we care about is the bearing and distance to the next mark. Everything else is on the boat electronics. Up and down buttons to scroll through a fixed set of waypoints seems like such an easy interface to acomplish this.

I'll look at the Quatix 3 stuff. I own the 235, and it is basically always on my wrist so it would be really nice to just have it at my disposal. I don't want to reinvent the wheel.

tommays56 over 9 years ago

fenix 3/tactix Bravo/quatix 3 software version 6.84 Beta

At this point the Fenix 3 and Quatix 3 are the same watch running the same firmware and all the marine apps are free to download to the Fenix 3 I am a bit lost as to what the plan was as there is nothing outstanding on the Quatix 3 for marine use and like the Fenix 3 with a kind of crippled basecamp the Quatix 3 has a kind crippled homeport as they do not work like the did with the previous versions of the watches

I can setup the Fenix 3 to be a much better sailing watch then the current sailing app as it does not support navigation and you can make a sailing profile on the watch that does its still more difficult than using the handheld or fixed mount GPS