skippermdj wrote:

I've owned and been using Expedition for about 6 months now.  Used on a couple of distance races (Mac and Queens' Cup) and an extended delivery.   It is awesome, very "deep" and capable.

 I'm in the process of outfitting my new (to me) C&C 34/36+ racer/cruiser with electronics to replace the 20+-year-old B&G network instruments.   

I've been looking at a couple of the racing-oriented instrument companies systems.  One uses a proprietary masthead instrument, 3-axis compass and airmar speed paddle, the other recommends the Maretron WS100 acoustic masthead instrument, Airmar 3-axis compass and speed paddle.  Both integrate the sensors to their proprietary brain box using NMEA 2000 and for both the system package price is between $8,000 and $10,000.

What both of these systems offer is very accurate TWA/TWS/TWD/BSP, with compensation for heel, pitch, yaw, roll and leewayto enable the boat to be driven to its polars.  

So my question:  after calibration and with the data available on the NMEA bus from, say, a Maretron WS100 (or Airmar WX200), Airmar HS2183 compass, Airmar ST850 speed sensor and any good NMEA GPS sensor, can I use Expedition to derive and feed back to the NMEA 2000 network TWD/TWS/TWA with comparable accuracy to,a dedicated proprietary brain box (Ockham or B&G come to mind)? 

It looks to me like I can get pretty close to a $10K system for about $3K plus the PC and Expedition that I already own.  Anybody have experience or informed opinion whether I'm on the right track or way off base here?

Thanks!

As you state, Expedition can calculate TWD/A/S for you (as well as current, leeway), and that is what will be displayed in Expedition when selected. Your challenge is to display these new numbers on deck - you can do this with Garmin displays (10 channels available).

You will also have some powerful and very flexible calibration available.

I've not done this personally (the Garmin displays - but have done a lot of calibraiton in Exp), but should deliver very good results, and very good value for money against a full blown integrated system.