Contact Anchor Pro Support

by TwoHulls

The Anchor Pro application has several interesting features and modes in which to set the anchor position: Current Position, Relative, or Absolute Coordinates. Did not test Current Position mode. However, either due to GPS errors or underlying software error, Relative and Absolute Coordinate modes to not work well as if there is geometry rotation error or worse, no filtering of position, velocity, heading and GPS DOPs. This results in repetitive false alarms and need to continually increase the allowable anchor distance to unacceptable values and erroneous tracks. In several cases Anchor Pro position track was well forward over my 120 anchor rode length and anchor location while in 23 knots of wind. Note that the IPhone placed in unobstructed clear sky. AnchorPro reported GPS accuracy of 13 to 20 feet.

In my test case, anchored on catamaran in 25 knots with cross swell and tide. The yaw rotation as well as swing causes havoc with AnchorPro positioning and short baseline position calculations.

Comparing tracks and actual anchor position if my B&G Zeus system chart plotter vs Anchor Pro makes the error in Anchor Pro obvious. Screen caps of tracks of B&G vs AnchorPro sent to the developer - ideaboys

Promising but needs better positioning and filtering algorithm. Doesn’t appear to have an update in 8 months. Hope IdeaBoys addresses this otherwise useless to me.

by Orchid132

It’s working great but every other day it has glitches all of a sudden it shows that the boat is 300 or 700 feet away from the anchor. The GPS tracking sometimes work, and other times doesn’t. And while our general position doesn’t change (for example we are surrounded by 3 boats and our general distance in relationship to those boats doesn’t change), according ding to the app we end up 130+ feet away from the original location.

by Znuttyone

The app does what it’s designed for and does it well. I used it in 14-18mph winds and a high tidal flow area so the boat had a 180 degree swing. As I monitored our position on multiple devices this app was relatively accurate ( iOS gps accuracy could be better) . The interface is very intuitive and straight forward. All in all great job sloth

Suggestions : 1-provide an icon to increase / decrease radius or maybe allow user to drop anchor and then have a settling period where you monitor the speed and drift to determine anchor heading along with rode deployed
2- allow anchor review input , maybe ask for specific info like protection , bottom holding , need wash down , etc and link to active captain account to feed reviews. You could also pull anchorage info from AC and provide a richer Experince to users
3- with tracking of boat movement allow changing the track color , the current color is hard to see in certain lighting
4- Scan WiFi connection for nema2000 GPS and allow to switch to it as primary GPS for higher accuracy. Maybe even have redundancy and intelligence to validate on device against another ( I have two GPS on the boat , one for ais, one for navigation + the iOS device )

—————update—————
Thanks for contacting me ... look forward to seeing the enhancements