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Board » General Discussion » VRTool and Sailonline

VRTool - a navigation software for Windows - is now compatible with Sailonline, using Brainaid's NMEA proxy over TCP/IP connection.

Check:

http://www.tecepe.com.br/phpbb3/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=3041

Home page

http://www.tecepe.com.br/nav/vrtool

--- Last Edited by omarfreis at 2014-10-08 19:38:07 ---
Thank you very much for doing this.

As I'm running linux, I ran VRTool trough wine. I couldn't load GRIB files, VRTool freezes without error. It's not that I expect VRTool to run on linux, but it makes me ask you some questions rather than trying it out myself:

- How is the weather interpolation? I read you've worked on that, but I'm not sure about interpolation over time. I only see one "navigation through time" option, and it's in jumps of 12 hours. For use of VRTool with sailonline, it's essential that it allows for some realism.
- Are there any advanced manuals or tutorials. All I could find until now were some basic things.
I have seen people run vrtool on iMacs, using Parallels or VM. I don't know about Linux and Wine.

VRTool can import gribs directly from noaa or use gribs from other programs, like ugrib and zygrib.

Wind forecast interpolation is available for both space and time, modes previous, nearest, linear and quadratic, always looking forward. Very configurable (sometimes too much so!)

More on this:
http://www.tecepe.com.br/wiki/index.php?title=Winds_Tab

As for manuals, there is the program's Wiki. And Forum. Go to:

http://www.tecepe.com.br/nav/vrtool








--- Last Edited by omarreis at 2014-11-26 11:16:22 ---

--- Last Edited by omarreis at 2014-11-26 11:26:32 ---
Perhaps someone can clarify this: we run on the Wx obtained from NOAA---what then does it matter what VRTool gets? We are stuck with the SOL weather. Does the VRTool get a different prediction than SOL?
If it breaks, it's not strong enough--if it doesn't, it's too heavy.
Omar, thank you for your answer.

Rod,
As I understand, VRTool can open gribs, no matter their origin. Additionally, it has a built in option to download gribs from NOAA. This is very similar to other routers.

The gribs contain information for the wind at intervals of (usually about) 3 hours. Since VRTool didn't seem to have and option to navigate through time with steps smaller than 3 hours, I wondered if VRTool was actually interpolating over time. It seems it can even be configured.

I think using bilinear for spacial interpolation and quadratic for interpolation over time will be the closest match to sol.

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