Have NASA wind transducers improved?

[fredrussell]

I seem to recall NASA wind transducers had a less than excellent reputation on this forum a few years back. My first boat came with NASA Clipper wind that seldom, if ever, worked well. I’m considering replacing my dead Stowe wind instrument next year and the NASA units are certainly keenly priced. Any owners care to give some feedback on either the wired or wireless Clipper wind setups?

 

[MattS]

Replaced my Stowe with a NASA Tactical Wind (wired) when I had the mast down earlier this year. Has been working well so far, but obviously not had a particularly long run yet.

Easy to take an NMEA feed from it, which I then feed to my laptop at the chart table and gives me a wind repeater down below.

Unless you’re racing and need hyper-sensitivity, don’t get the tactical version. I thought “why not” given price was marginal, but it sends 10 updates per second instead of 1/s - and that’s just far too much data if you want to take the NMEA data and feed it to other devices. 1/s would have been fine for me.

 

[Alfie168]

NASA are one of those rare companies where you can ring them up and talk to somebody and have sense talked back to you. Why not contact them and air your concerns and see what they say. They might be able to tell you something that answers your concerns.
You certainly don't see such issues crop up on here very often so there is a good chance they have been modified/ improved.

 

[pandos]

My friend had one on his ancient vivacity that worked well for probably 20years up until he got rid of the boat in 2006....I fitted a new one in 2006 to my boat and it was useless after a few years it was never consistent and eventually gave up completely.

This year I fitted a reconditioned mast head unit and it seems to be fine so far. Survived many sails in 30 plus winds and the storm recently and displays a seemingly accurate windspeed.

When I checked the one which I fitted in 2006 it was wet inside and totally destroyed from corrosion...

So I guess a mixed bag.....

 

[Graham376]

Replaced my Stowe with a wireless NASA about 3 years ago, still working fine but not as responsive as the Stowe.

 

[[70521]]

My last boat had NASA kit. It worked faultlessly.

My current boat had Stowe kit, It was replaced by Garmin as I could integrate it with the chart plotter.

 

[Wing Mark]

My new to me boat has a Nasa wind instrument. It takes a bit of breeze to move the cups, but I think it's been up there about 8 years collecting guano.
The direction seems to only have a coarse resolution?
If you want to calculate true wind etc , I'd guess you need to pay more.

 

[neil_s]

It depends, like a lot of other things, on how you look after them. My NASA Wind was second hand and I have had it 15 years - but I take the mast down every winter and NASA gets stowed away while it's not needed. It has had replacement cups, twice, It has also had some epoxy glue repair to the spindles where they fit into the transducer moulding.

 

[Beelzebub]

All wind transucers take a hammering and to some degree, the more you are prepared to spend, the better the performance. You only have to take a walk around a marina on a supposedly windless day and look upwards at yacht mastheads. I wouldn't mind betting that the majority of anemometer cups actually spinning are B & G.