Nasa Clipper Instruments

[willemvrijhoeve]

Last year I bought a Dutch 32 feet yacht (Defender 32) from 1973 and I am replacing a lot of equipment as part of my restoration project. This includes the beautiful old but derelict instruments. Based on price it seems that Nasa Clipper instruments (wind, speed and depth) seems to be a good choice. Can anyone advise me as to whether these instruments are reliable and durable.

[GordMay]

Greetings and welcome aboard the CF, Willem.

Hopefully, those with explicit experience with the Clipper instrument line will chime in.

Generally, NASA (Marine Ltd) instruments are budget, entry level instruments, best known for their price.

[Weyalan]

I have a full set of NASA Clipper instruments:
· Depth
· Speed
· Wind
· Close hauled wind
· GPS repeater

I installed these about 2 years ago. So far they have functioned pretty much faultlessly. The only problem we have had is that the wind instrument occasionally seems to stop functioning, but switching it off and back on seems to fix this… and this happens maybe 2 or 3 times in a year.

The GPS repeater interfaces with most standard chart plotters – mine is a fairly basic Navman, but again, this works really well. The plotter is at the Nav station, down below, with the repeater on deck. The repeater shows speed and heading and, if you put in a way-point on the plotter, then the repeater will also show distance to waypoint and bearing to waypoint with a “highway” style graphic to direct you towards the waypoint. We use this facility all the time.

These are very basic instruments. They do not “talk” to each other, so you cannot; for example, get any true wind speed, only apparent. However, they are very attractively priced. So far (touch wood) I am happy with them.

[barnakiel]

Best know for price. Actually though, the only trouble I have seen was with their wind.

If you are looking for budget stuff, we are using some of Raymarine ST40. I can recommend ST40 to anybody and I will replace with same on my boat should anything break down (7 y.o., zero problems).

b.