Holy moly! I was just over at Panbo looking at some of the cool stuff on his site and found the app My Anchor Watch. It is an app that works on a Blackberry®, that’s right a Blackberry®, not an iphone®. I have always liked Apple®, don’t get me wrong, but I’ve just never been able to justify the cost for myself. Back to the topic on hand.
This seems like a great app! Check out the tutorial video. Sorry, I am basically a big fat nerd, known to download and read owner manuals for stuff I don’t even have, or incredibly, ever will own, but enough about that. This app will monitor your anchored position via the GPS on your Blackberry®. You can set up varying parameters specific to your anchoring situation, such as normal swing area and alarm area. They recommend a difference of 20 meters between your scope length and the alarm distance to allow for variances inherent in the GPS readings. The really nice feature is that you can exclude an area from the swing area, called angle limiting, so that if the wind switches direction and your anchor is at risk of coming loose the alarm will sound. Very cool.
The My Anchor Watch app also can send a SMS message to another phone. One reason I think this is good is that for your Blackberry® to receive GPS it needs clear viewing of the satellites and as such needs to be outside more or less. So what I’m thinking is the Blackberry® with My Anchor Watch on it in the cockpit, in a Ziploc® to keep dry and another SMS capable phone down below where you are sleeping. Another advantage is that if you need to go ashore, you can bring the 2nd phone to monitor the anchoring. If you are worried about someone stealing your Blackberry® while you are gone, look at it this way, if someone steals the Blackberry® it will travel outside the anchor position, and you will know that someone has boarded your boat. You can probably run the app in the background and the thieves won’t know it’s running. Anchor and theft alert, all in one. The app cost is $19.99, pretty inexpensive in my opinion. Sign me up.
I Will try this out! thanks for sharing!
Excellent application that works grate for me! You idea with two phones is not needed. Have used it down below and have no accuracy or reception problems.