Remote Anchor Alarm / Buzzer

[farotherside]

I sleep with a Garmin GPSMap 76cx. It beats an iPhone's/Blackberry's battery life by about 10 hours, runs on double-a batteries, and hasn't let me down yet.

Having lived at anchor for about two years now, there's been dozens of times that I wouldn't have gotten a minute of sleep all night without the little GPS beside me reassuring me that I wasn't heading towards the rocks.

[timbenner]

WARNING: I've got the "Anchor Alarm for the iPhone", by Chris Parsons and it's worthless! I set it for 100 feet and drove 5 miles before it went off. Repeated the test a dozen times with the same results. Sounds like he has more of a liability than a money maker.

I would never use my chart plotter for an over night anchor alarm, because it consumes too much power.

[noelex 77]

Originally Posted by Palarran

Noelex, power for me isn't a really big issue. Do you know if you can make a small plotter like that a slave of the main unit? Where if you change the main one it is reflected on the small one and vise versa? I can turn the brilliance down on my main unit to conserve some power.

If power isn’t a problem running the chartplotter with separate cheap alarm may be best solution.

If, however, you install a separate GPS like the Furuno Gp-32 that I have by my bed you will have extra redundancy, and it can communicate and send the GPS position to the chartplotter if the main GPS fails. It is not possible to link things like brilliance between the units. You would have to adjust the brightness on each unit separately, but important information like position and speed will be shared. Normally I use either the chartplotter or the GP-32 rather than both units at once.

At night I turn off the main chartplotter and use the 32 visible from the bed (with anchor alarm)

Turning down the brightness on a chart;plotter will have a major influence on its power consumption., but if you are using a simple B&W GPS like the Furuno GP-32 the brightness has little impact on its power draw. Full dim on the 32 is about 0.17A and full brightness is about 0.22A.
Chartplotters vary enormously in their power consumption between models but 1.2A on full dim to 2.8A on full brightness would be average for a small plotter.

I am feel a separate GPS next to the bed is the best solution as it provides redundancy, low power consumption, you can see the boats position, and it avoids the problem of external alarms interfering, or damaging the main GPS.
I spend almost 365 days a year at anchor so your priorities may be different, but to me the small additional cost of a GPS visible from where I sleep has been one of the best improvements I have made to the Yacht.

[mbianka]

Originally Posted by ActiveCaptain

Check this out:

My AnchorWatch - Features, Introduction

I haven't used that one because I don't have a BB, but it's been out for over a year.

Regarding a baby monitor - we tried that a few years ago before the phone thing. It kinda, sorta worked. The major problem is that there is more noise due to wind, rocking, halliards, and especially birds than you'd imagine. We kept getting woken up by birds and finally had to turn the thing off. They also typically need AC power and aren't very efficient with power use.

Jeff:
Looks like a real useful app that I will certainly download it when my boat kisses the water this year. Last year I had a frightening anchor alarm in mid day. Never knew I was dragging until the keel bumped while I went below for ten minutes. I hate when that happens. So far it only happened once but, that was scary enough for me. I especially like that you don't have to be in cell phone range as it uses the phones GPS reciever. Very nice! Thanks for the info.

[Palarran]

It's always funny to me how these things turn out but I happen to have an extra GP-37 on Palarran now. It didn't occur to me to relocate it to my berth but distance wise it's very close so the wiring should be a cake walk. I'm going to get a buzzer also as they are only $4 at Radio Shack. The problem with relocating the GP-37 is by the time I figure out what to do with the hole in my helm station console, it will cost $500 bucks.

Some great information, thank you all.