Here are some ideas from a real life Digital Yacht AIT5000 installation with iPad connectivity and integration with world beating NKE sailboat instrumentation and autopilot control. NKE is a French company that has been developing instruments and pilots dedicated to the ocean yacht racing market for more than 30 years. Look at any professional sailing boat and you’ll see they are the instrument system of choice. Combine with our AIT5000 Class B+ AIS transponder and an iPad running the advanced Weather 4D app and you’ve an amazing integrated system – at an amazing price too.
AIT5000 is the heart of the navigation system
The AIT5000 is a Class B+ transponder utilising the latest SOTDMA 5W technology for faster, super reliable position reports. It has a built in VHF-AIS antenna splitter too so there’s no need for extra masthead antenna clutter as the VHF antenna can be shared with VHF and AIS. You can find out more about Class B+ AIS HERE.
The AIT5000 also features a built in WiFi interface allowing connection to the iPad. You can then see AIS targets and GPS position in real time on the Weather 4D application. The picture below shows a screen shot of the app with AIS and GPS data. Tap on a target for boat details and see their heading with a neat heading vector.
Connecting the AIT5000 to the NKE instruments
NKE use a propitiatory interface called TopLine but they also offer a simple interface box to output NMEA instrument data to and from the AIT5000. Some systems also have a native NMEA 0183 output too so getting access to the data is easy. This is a real life installation drawing showing how the AIT5000 can integrate. Data from the instruments is fed to the NMEA input on the AIT5000 and sent across to the Weather 4D app or any other navigation apps. The NMEA output on the AIT5000 is connected to the NKE autopilot.
You can see the yacht underway in the screen shot below. Note how there’s a wind data instrument display attached to the boat’s icon. Therefore allowing you to instantly and easily assimilate all the boat data at a glance. You can download weather data as an animated forecast from the web. On the same display, there’s an overlay of wind data. You can also have barometric pressure, wave and temperature information as well as AIS and GPS position.
Autopilot control from the app
The wireless interface on the AIT5000 is bi-directional. In the picture below, you can see in green the incoming NMEA data and in yellow the outgoing NMEA data that are transmitted by the AIT5000 to the navigation equipments.
Therefore, the AIT5000 can send route data back to the navigation system and you can control an autopilot from the app. Weather 4D outputs PDB, BOD, BWC, RMB, XTE and WPL messages. The autopilot can follow the route set in Weather4D.
Finally here’s everything working with the display and control of an active route data on the pilot display. Welcome to next generation, affordable navigation from Digital Yacht, NKE and Weather 4D.
We’re pleased to be able to offer a 1 year FREE subscription to the weather service of the Weather4D app with the purchase of any Digital Yacht wireless product. For more information please click here.
