First, open Sailplanner and authenticate by entering your username and password which you got when subscribing. When Sailplanner is launched you should see a main window shown to the left here.

The map-window is the most central window in Sailplanner. It consists of the map with overlays of weather, boats and other information.

Somewhere on the map you will also find you boat as a pink boat symbol, likely heading north.

Start by choosing what region you are interested in. You switch region by simply selecting a region from the drop-down list in the upper roght corner of the map window.

The most basic manipulation of the map window is the controls for moving and zooming and looks like this where the two leftmost buttons are for zooming in/out, the boat symbol focuses the map to your boat’s position and the rightmost symbol is for moving the map.

In Sailplanner, you always have a boat and there are two ways of telling Sailplanner the position of your boat. First, you can simply drag and drop your boat symbol using your computer mouse. Your other option is to connect Sailplanner to a GPS or similar device using a serial port. The choice is done using “Lock to NMEA” in the boat-window. A more detailed instruction on this is given in Appendix F.

Among the tool in the main toolbar there is a ruler-symbol. This symbol lets you measure courses and distances between arbitrary points in the map. Simply choose the ruler tool and click using your mouse. A double-click ends the ruler input mode.

The time slider just below the main toolbar in the main window lets you slide through the time and thereby view the forecast at any given time. Simply drag the transparent light blue indicator to the desired time. Note that Sailplanner always referrers to time in the Universal Time Coordinated, UTC standard. The pink “arrow” indicates the current time according to your computer’s clock.

Sailplanner automatically checks for updated forecasts if your computer is online. In off-line situations Sailplanner shows the latest downloaded forecast. The forecast may, depending on area etc contain slightly different information fields. All forecasts contain wind speed (True wind speed TWS) and wind direction (true wind direction TWD) at the 10 meter level. Note that TWD in Sailplanner always refers to where the wind comes from. Thus, TWD=45 deg is wind coming from north-east. Other fields often available are temperature and atmospheric pressure at sea level. Wind speed can be shown in m/s or in knots by user choice in the “show” menu.

There are several visualization options regarding the graphical appearance of the weather available in the “Show”-menu.

·         The arrow option shows blue wind arrows that show direction and to some extent wind speed by changing length and color.

·         The wind-iso-lines option connects (with a line) locations with the same wind speed. Somewhere on the lines you will find a number indicating the wind speed for that particular iso-line.

·        The pressure-iso-lines works just like the wind-iso-lines but shows the sea level pressures in hPa in a red tone.

·         The overlay option lets you draws a thin shaded overlay to make different wind speeds or pressures even more visible.

 The meteogram

A meteogram in Sailplanner typically looks like the example to the right.

·         Below the diagram is the time axis in hours.

·         The thick black vertical line marks the time of the time-slider.

·         The red curve which is attached to the left vertical axis with a ring in this case shows the wind speed.

·         The blue curve, attached to the right vertical axis shows the wind direction or temperature.

In the boat-window you can choose to “share position” if you want to let other sailplaner-users see your whereabouts. If you choose to “share position” and are online, data regarding your position, speed and heading is automatically sent to the Sailplanner server and distributed to other boats.

Other boats who are sharing their position will show up on your map if you have the “Other bots” option active in the “Show” menu. If another boat is online the boat symbol is drawn in green. If the boat is offline the boat symbol is drawn in gray. Some information about the boats are available if you point the mouse on them.

Sailplanner is equipped with a chat-window. Given that you are online, you can chat with other online users of Sailplanner at any time. The chat window can be closed and re-opened through the Window drop-down menu.

The boat performance diagram

The first step in viewing and working with you on boat’s performance in to include a suitable performance curve into Sailplanner. The format for editing and importing these diagrams are explained in Appendix B. A starting point might be to select one of the prepared performance, or often called polar-plots from the Sailplaner’s database. Simply select your choice in the boat window. To view the performance of the selected boat click the polar icon in the main window toolbar. And you will see a curve similar to the one to the right here. The polar diagram shows the boat speed in knots as a function of true wind speed and true wind angle, i.e. the angle between the boats compass course and the true wind direction. Each curve represents a wind speed which is shown in the legend. The boat speed is read as the distance from the origin (=the point where all curves collapse at zero wind) and the curve. The wind angles are written in degrees at the outer radius. Details in how to use the polar diagrams are explained in Appendix B.

Sailplanner has an optional way of showing the boats performance for the current wind called the polar butterfly, shown to the right. Simply tick the “show Butterfly” in the boat window. Besides the tick box you can choose the prediction time. The butterfly graphically shows you the boat speed in all directions and where you will be in some time in various directions under the condition that the weather stays unchanged. The butterfly is connected to the time slider so that it shows the situation at the time the time slider indicates.

Sailplanner has a quite basic waypoint representation. The waypoints-editor-window is opened in the window-menu and looks something like the example here to the right. You can create new waypoints, edit old waypoints and delete waypoints. Although the lat/lon-format is the standard as in the example the input format is very flexible. You can input positions in many ways, see Appendix D for a closer description. Importing and exporting of waypoints from a text-file is not yet implemented.

1. Pick the course you want to follow by using the mesh tool. Simply click out your waypoints on the map and end with a double click. You can also change your course by dragging the red nodes. Double clicking on a line will insert a new node. Double-clicking a node with shift-key pressed will delete that node from the route.

2. Choose the your boat Polar (Not available with the Free subscription).
 
3. Choose resolution for the calculations in the routing window. 
   (Less calculations with low)                                                                              

4. Start the routing calculation by clicking the calc route button. Extensive    calculations are now initiated that might take some time. An indicator is showing weather routing calculation is in progress or not. The routing may be cancelled by pressing the stop button to the right of the activity-bar