Flying Start connects to your boat's instruments over Bluetooth and WiFi. Wind speed, boat speed, depth, heading and tidal current — live on your iPhone, fused into the race engine.
Wind sensor, depth, compass, speed paddle — your existing hardware
BLE, WiFi, NMEA 2000 bus, or Signal K server bridges the data
Decodes, fuses, and displays readings alongside GPS race data
Line bias, tidal current, enriched tracks, and conditions logging
Instrument data appears as PRO widgets alongside your countdown, DTL, and TTL. Customise the layout. The data you need, where you need it.
Flying Start doesn't just show your readings — it puts them to work. Instrument data feeds directly into the race engine to give you intelligence no chart plotter can.
True wind direction combined with the start line bearing gives you the favoured end in real-time. Know whether to go for the PIN or the committee boat before anyone else on the line.
GPS speed over ground minus boat speed through water, resolved as a vector. Flying Start calculates the current speed and direction — critical intelligence for tidal venues.
Every GPS track point is stamped with instrument data — wind, depth, heading, boat speed. Replay your race with the full picture. See where the breeze was and how you sailed through it.
Your instrument data flows through the live tracking relay alongside your position. Race committees see your wind readings on the web dashboard in real-time.
Race committees can set wind and depth thresholds. Automatic alerts when conditions exceed safe limits. The kind of situational awareness that keeps the fleet safe.
10-second snapshots of all instrument readings are logged throughout the race. Circular wind averages, trend analysis, and full history available on the web dashboard.
Four protocols cover the majority of marine instrument systems afloat today. From a portable wind sensor on a dinghy to a full NMEA 2000 bus on a 50-footer.
Solar-powered, no moving parts, pairs via Bluetooth Low Energy in seconds. Perfect for dinghies, sportsboats, and club racers who don't have fixed instruments.
Plug into the boat's NMEA 2000 backbone and stream every instrument to your phone over Bluetooth. Masthead wind, depth, heading, speed — the full bus.
Connects to any device that serves NMEA 0183 sentences over WiFi — Shipmodul MiniPlex, Yacht Devices, Digital Yacht iKonvert, or a Raspberry Pi. Auto-discovered via Bonjour.
Connect to any Signal K server on the boat's network. REST snapshot on connection, live updates via WebSocket. The open-source future of marine data, supported today.
| Reading | Calypso BLE | NavLink Blue | WiFi NMEA | Signal K |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apparent Wind Speed | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Apparent Wind Angle | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| True Wind Speed | — | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| True Wind Direction | — | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Boat Speed (water) | — | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Compass Heading | — | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Water Depth | — | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Rate of Turn | — | ✓ | ✓ | — |
| Water Temperature | — | ✓ | — | ✓ |
| Barometric Pressure | — | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Battery Level | ✓ | — | — | — |
| Tidal Current * | — | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Line Bias * | — | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
* Tidal current requires boat speed + heading. Line bias requires true wind direction. These are computed by Flying Start from the raw readings — they work with any source that provides the inputs.
Running a Calypso on the pushpit and a NavLink Blue on the bus? Flying Start handles it. Higher-quality sources take priority automatically — or you override manually.
Fixed, calibrated masthead instruments on the bus. Highest confidence. If the bus is providing true wind, it wins.
Aggregated and often filtered by the server. Good quality, but one step removed from the raw instruments.
Direct wired connection to instruments. Reliable, but often older hardware with less calibration.
Portable sensor — great for apparent wind on dinghies, but less accurate than a fixed masthead unit on a keelboat.
If a higher-priority source goes stale (no update for 5 seconds), a lower-priority source takes over automatically. Every reading shows which source is providing it.
Flying Start is a race timer used by competitive sailors at yacht clubs. Every instrument connection is a PRO feature — your hardware becomes the reason sailors upgrade. We're looking for partners to help us put the right hardware in sailors' hands.
We've built and tested against the published protocol specs with over 200 automated test vectors. A loaner device lets us validate against real hardware and catch edge cases before our users do.
A "Works with Flying Start" badge for your product page. A "Recommended hardware" section in our app. Joint content showing your device connected to a race-winning setup.
We support your protocol fully — not a lowest-common-denominator integration. If you're developing new features (firmware updates, new PGNs, custom BLE services), we want to support them on day one.
Standard Environmental Sensing characteristics for Calypso. Custom Digital Yacht service UUIDs for NavLink Blue. Background BLE via CoreBluetooth state restoration — instruments reconnect automatically.
Binary frame decoder for 7 sailing PGNs: Wind Data (130306), Speed Water (128259), Depth (128267), Heading (127250), Rate of Turn (127251), Temperature (130312), Pressure (130314).
Full parser with checksum validation for MWV, VHW, DBT, DPT, HDG, HDT, ROT, XDR, and more. TCP and UDP transport with NWConnection. Bonjour auto-discovery for _nmea-0183._tcp.
REST snapshot on initial connection for current state. WebSocket subscription for live deltas. Full SI unit conversion — radians to degrees, Kelvin to Celsius, Pascals to hectopascals.
Priority-based data routing with per-reading source tracking. Stale data fallback (5s threshold). User-overridable priorities. The best reading always wins — automatically.
GPS SOG vector minus boat speed along heading vector = tidal current. Pure trigonometry, no external data required. Updates every second when BSP and heading are available.
You've invested in hardware. Make it count on the start line. Download Flying Start, connect your instruments, and turn raw data into race-winning intelligence.
Instrument widgets require Flying Start Pro