The way I would approach the startling is to use "ping mark" 
It will put a mark (not part of the course) and show it always. 
I would then draw dividers between P and S, then you will quickly see the marks ahead, behind and on the line, and you maintain the ends, Distance to line etc.

Maybe I don’t explain myself well.

We got the end coordinates on gps. They are the red and green on the drawing here

https://www.autodraw.com/share/8K62K5H81TE1

The line is very long so it would take an hour to drive to both ends. We ho to port end and store it, finding it a few meters off. However as we start to go along the line we find the first yellow mark, the. The second. They are not on the gps line. It seems the stbdend is a few hundred meters off. But short of driving there we cannot know for sure, and we want to start at port so we don’t want to. I could store the second yellow mark as stbd start mark, but then if there is a sudden change and we want to go to another part of the line we don’t see the ‘original’ end.

So if I could add the intermediate marks as part of the start line, or use it to ‘adjust’ the other end, it would be great.

may I pick up this again? I just ran into this yesterday and thought about a simpler soulution. 

We had a race where there was a start line about 1km long. We had 2 end buoys, and 3 'intermediate' buoys. Also, we had another part of the start line, for another group, which was on the same line. I did NOT had the end positions on GPS, but knew the length of both line.
As we went out, I could ping the 'other line', the port buoy for us and the second intermediate buoy for us. Also, I had a few times where RC motorboats 'painted' the line by going between the buoys close to us which I actually pinged as a further out stbd mark.

Normally what I'd do is decide the 'quadrant' of the line I want to start in (say, between the first and second intermediate buoy), ping those and forget the rest of the line. In an ideal world I'd ping both ends, but that would need 20mins of motoring, and normally we wont need both ends.  The problem was that this time there was a major wind shoft 8 minutes before the gun, and I wanted to go to the stbd end. It would have been very useful to have a time to the end of the line, the one I never pinged. 

As a note, this is a small boat, and I helm while navigate. I use Exp 99% to drive the onboard displays with performance data, and navigation is much less important (as we are on a lake). But that means I am really busy at start and would solve this at the simplest way. So while shooting the 'other' line and adding a tangent then manually put the end line and check the length...would take too much time.

Basically, what would have helped, is a button to 'extend' or 'retract' the line by a given amount. So I could ping the port and one intermediate, and extend it towards the starboard. This would also help if I get a 'line' from an RC boat, and then I can ping that to extend the line. 
This function would also help when multiple classes are starting and the RC says they shortened the line. Ideally one would reping it, but sometimes there is no time. 

Thank you!

hi @Campbell,

I dont have that working. I only have a trial Exp11 on this laptop right now, but I just dropped a P and S on the map, and clicked From Port. As you can see in the screenshot, the line bearing is about 170, yet the bearing in the dialog box is 3. And wherever I move those points, I always have this bearing. I dont want to manually give in a bearing, I want it derived from the previous start line.
But you are right saying this could be a place to put this function, or rather, just upgrade this function to read the current line bearing and fill that field. And by that token, have the current length also filled for reference.


[img]blob:https://expedition.boardhost.com/461c11c0-ab67-404c-970a-324561fb831d[/img]

Last edited by rbhun (5/12/2024 1:44 pm)

I got my home machine licensed and voila it works. Thank you this is a very useful addition.

FWIW it wasn’t working in v12 trial either.