I recorded a GPS track of a little sail-around in my boat. Then, just for fun, tried making a polar diagram. I was just thinking that some of the models that are made by members here could easily take a smartphone on board (and some have of course). Then polar diagrams could possibly be made to try to compare models. It’s really hard to make a proper polar diagram, but you still can get a lot of useful information just by plotting points in Excel.

As you can see, my polar diagram doesn’t really match my GPS track, though!

Wind direction is coming from approximately SW. The excel file can be found on my website here:
http://www.tdem.co.nz/outrigger-canoe
whenever the host starts working again (you get what you pay for with web hosting unfortunately, and I pay nothing 😊 )

If you haven’t looked at it, Kevins article might help. I confess I haven’t really tried to comprehend it all yet.

http://wikiproa.pbworks.com/w/page/14592498/Making a graph from GPS data

Cheers,
Skip

Yes Kevins article inspired me to try this. Unfortunately my phone doesn’t spit out all the nice data his GPS did, so I used a different method. Looking at it again I think it might actually be reasonable. The lake gets big windshifts, easily 20 degrees, quite regularly so it’s never going to be that accurate.
-Thomas