Despite a breezy Saturday and a breezy Monday, Sunday morning itself was a pretty glassy view!! Many coffees were drunk and it was extremely sociable, I must say….but we didn’t race. As usual, the talk was of sailing, sailing, sailing!!
Craig and Nigel were undeterred. To get Nigel tuned up for the IOM Worlds in Gladstone, Australia, our super-heroes spent hours and hours out on the water chasing the breeze, practising manoeuvres and testing the state of tune. It was extremely interesting to see them in action.
Wondering what rig you should use today ?? There is simply no better option than looking at the windsock and figuring it out. Do you carry an anemometer in the car?? It’ll sound mad, I know, but I’ve kept one in the car for about 20 years. It cost about a tenner, so it doesn’t owe me anything! The windsock plus an anemometer is great !!
Then I discovered this, on my three year old Apple Watch.
I don’t know how many of us wear an Apple Watch. Quite a few…. Probably at least Apple and Samsung watches can do this trick.
In the photo above, that’s the wind speed and direction at our Club (Datchet) right now. Gust speeds when I check them are usually double the stated number, so easy to remember. So right now it’s 17mph gusting 30-35mph. Quite a lot!
If you have an Apple Watch and this is news to you, like it is to me, then this is how you do it:-
Go to your main Apple weather app which is on the phone when you buy it by default. The icon is a weather cloud with the sun peeping out behind it.
Make sure your Club is a chosen, selected and stored location.
Now go to the Apple Watch app and do two steps
Go to the Weather app that is INSIDE the Apple Watch app. Select your club location from the list. At Datchet for example, I use “Heathrow” – see above.
Ok – now the weather app is set, all you have to do is display it on the watch.
Most watch faces have little gadgets or widgets, but for the watches they call them “complications”. Obviously the tech people created the name before the marketing people could stop them. Probably whatever design of watch face that you have selected in “my watch” will have two or more complications available. In my example above, I am using the California type watch face. You can see at the bottom that two complications are available. I’ve decided to use the “sub-dial bottom” complication for weather.
If you click on that sub-dial field, you get offered a huge choice but page through to “weather”.
There’s a good few options even for “weather” and select “wind”.
A few days ago, we published a piece on a relatively advanced idea of using the Program Mixer function (also known as “Channel Mixers” and “Power Mixers”) and on the Futaba menu it is shown as “P.MIX”.
We have a feeling that maybe only recent Futaba T6K transmitters have P.MIX software built in. My own transmitter is a T6K Version 3. It has P.MIX. The manual that came with the transmitter in 2023 turns out to be a manual for Version 2…. so no P.MIX instructions.
We’ve looked online for a version 3 manual without success, so far.
If you want to read up about P.MIX instructions, what you do is find a manual online for the T10J transmitter. The “Program Mixing” instruction pages start at Page 53. The T6K seems to have the first four channel mixers, though not the 5th and 6th mixer (with curves) that the T10J transmitter has. So if you feel happier using a Futaba manual as you tweak, then use these pages to guide you.
Datchet Radio Sailing - Making It All Much Easier !! 