noelex
Well-known member
Paul, you are certainly not alone in having an anchor alarm that works poorly. Having to set such a large alarm radius means the alarm is all but useless. Setting a good anchor alarm is surprisingly difficult. The hardware needs to be suitable and installed correctly. Importantly, the centre of alarm radius has to coincide with the anchor position.our old garmin gps had an anchor alarm feature that worked great, the furono we have now doesn't and the one on the raymarine plotter isn't much use on deck!
I have tried most of the android ones and never go a full nights sleep without it going of at some point even when the swing is set to 150~200m with 20m of chain out, I think the gps goes to sleep despite all the settings being as recommended by the app developers (tried it on 3 phones and 2 tablets - all Samsung), I just put more chain down and trust to a good anchor.
In many ways it is not dissimilar to problems of anchoring itself. If you have the right equipment and technique everything is easy and reliable.
The important message is that it is possible to to set a reliable alarm that will wake you up if your anchor moves more than very short distance. We do this every time we anchor and that is most days of the year. The only false positives we ever have are when forgetting to turn the alarm off when leaving (pretty stupid, but it does show the buzzer and the rest of the system is working).
The only other times the alarm goes off are on the occasions when we deliberately set an anchor alarm that is designed to wake us with a wind shift (this is not really a false positive, as the alarm is alerting us just as it has been set to do).
So it is worth persisting to sort out the problems with your anchor alarm. While an anchor alarm is only a secondary system (the primary system is good anchoring gear) it is nevertheless an important safety device. If you anchor frequently the alarm should be working well in my view. In our case it has proved its worth on at least a couple of occasions.