The Anchor Alarm function will check, in realtime, your GPS position against the defined anchor position and an acoustic and visual alarm will run once your GPS position is out of the selected range.
Anchor Alarm settings
From the Settings page you will find the Anchor Alarm setup page:
Set the anchor position
Quite obviously the anchor position is a critical information for the Anchor alarm function. You shall do all your best to set it as precise as possible because all the range calculations to detect if the anchor is dragging (and so your boat position is dangerously shifting), depend on this info.
NOTE: as "anchor position" it is intended the position where the anchor lay on the seafloor.
Each time you enable the anchoring mode you will be asked which anchor position shall be used:
- Start receiving AnchorLink: this is available only if you have the AnchorLink Mirroring enabled on another device and will start your remote Anchor alarm mode. See the AnchorLink page to further details.
- Current anchor position: it starts the anchor alarm using the currently defined anchor position.
- Live anchoring capture:
it allows to define a new anchor position meanwhile you are anchoring (also giving additional useful info for the anchoring itself). See "The Anchoring Process BEFORE Setting the Anchor Alarm" article for reference.
- After drop capture: in case you have already released your anchor and you would record its position. You have 2 different options to record the anchor position:
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- If you are just on top of the seafloor anchor position, you shall select the "A" option and press the "Capture GPS position" button and then press the "End procedure ..." button.
- If not, then select the "B" option, record your gps position with the "Capture GPS position" button and then, pointing the device towards the position where the anchor lay on the seafloor, enter the distance to it and finally press the "End procedure ..." button.
- If you are just on top of the seafloor anchor position, you shall select the "A" option and press the "Capture GPS position" button and then press the "End procedure ..." button.
You can restart the whole Anchor position process tapping on the "Set with GPS" button near the "Anchor position" label.
You can manually enter the anchor position coordinates tapping on the coordinates below the "Anchor position" label.
You can also select the anchor position on the map, after the Anchor alarm is enabled, tapping on the Anhor alarm circle, you get a pop-up menu with the option to move the anchor position manually.
Integration with the boat's built in instruments through a WiFi connection could greatly improve the Anchor alarm quality and stability. If you use the phone's GPS, moving around the boat makes it seem like you might be dragging. Instead, using the boat's real instruments it allows to use the high quality GPS mounted outside and doesn't move around as you walk around the boat. It's also very nice to see depth and wind on the phone next to your bed in the stateroom when leaving the anchor alarm running over night (turn on airplane mode to save power!).
Set the alarm parameters
Whenever (with some smart logic to avoid false alarms) the actual GPS position is further away from the recorded anchor position than the Alarm radius, the app will fire an acoustic and visual alarm.
The parameters available are:
- Alarm radius: represents the distance, in the unit of measure you set for the app (feet or meters), between the anchor position and your GPS device current position, out of which the alarm will start alerting you.
- Warning area: rapresents a percentage (%) of the alarm radius out of which the app will start rasing a warning (change circle from green to yellow color).
- Alarm delay (seconds): represents the number of seconds to wait, once the GPS device position is outside the alarm circle, before firing the alams. If the GPS position "comes back" before the alarm delay elapses, then the alarm is not fired.
NOTE: the GPS position calculated by the device could be moving around the real position, so maybe it is worthy to wait a bit before raising the alarm.
The Anchorage tracking setting will allow to track the GPS position during the anchoring. It is very helpful to have your anchoring track to see all the movement done by the boat while anchoring. This is also helpful to fine-tuning the Anchor Alarm setupfor your boat.
NOTE: the track recorded by this function has a completely different color and shape compared to the standard Track recording. It is a light gray and very thin line in order to not clutter the screen. In case you need to see the standard track color and shape you can enable the standard track recording.
You can select which of the available alarms you would enable:
- Distance alarm: this is the basic anchor alarm that will fire an alarm each time it detects the boat position is shifting outside the alarm radius.
- Low battery alarm: this is an additional alarm that will advice if (for any reason) your device battery is too low.
NOTE: we strongly suggest you, especially during the night, to plug-in the smartphone to a power socket in order to avoid battery consumption. - GPS quality alarm: this is an additional alarm that will advice you if (for any reason) your device will stop receiving a good enough GPS position.
NOTE: to avoid false alarms that wake up you in the night, this alarm will fire only if you do not receive the GPS (or receive a weak signal) for more than 5 consecutive minutes.
AnchorLink™ settings
In this section you can set all the AnchorLink parameters. See the dedicated AnchorLink page for details.
Anchor alarm info on map
To show the current Anchor alarm status the app draws on the map a colored circle centered on the Anchor position of this radius.
The circle could be shaded with four different colors:
- green (while the GPS is within the circle Warning Area),
- yellow (while the GPS is between the Warning area and the Alarm radius),
- red (when the GPS device position is outside the Alarm radius),
- gray (if there is not a good GPS info to be used).
A yellow line is drawn to show where the Warning circle begins.
In addition to the Anchor alarm circle a new dedicated window is added to the screen when the Anchor Alarm is active:
In this window you have:
- first row: the status of the Distance alarm. You can see:
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- an "OK" written in green, meaning everything is fine,
- a number written in red, meaning a distance alarm has been detected and the number represent the remaining seconds (from the Alarm delay) before the alarm is fired,
- a "GPS" written in red, meaning the GPS signal is weak or absent.
- second row: the Anchor distance from the actual GPS position and the anchor.
- third row: the Boat speed (if any) currently detected by the GPS.