Building your own dashboard
SailStats dashboards are built by you, not handed to you. Add a tile, choose which of the 26 data channels it shows, size it, and arrange the screen however you read fastest. Keep one layout for racing and another for a delivery.
Building a layout
Open the Dashboard tab
This is the screen you will spend most of your sailing time looking at.
Add a tile
Choose the data channel it should show from the list — wind, speed, depth, heading, navigation or one of the special tiles.
Size it
Big for the two or three numbers you steer to, small for the ones you only glance at.
Arrange the screen
Put what you look at most where your eye lands first. On a boat that is usually the top-left.
Long-press a tile to change it
Edit which channel it shows or its per-tile options, or remove it.
Set your units
Knots, km/h or mph; nautical miles, kilometres or miles. Wind can be set independently of boat speed.
What can a tile show?
Twenty-six channels. What actually appears depends on what your boat sends — no app can show wind without a masthead unit — so the table below says what each one needs.
| Group | Channels | Needs |
|---|---|---|
| Wind | Apparent wind angle and speed, true wind angle and speed, true wind direction | Masthead unit |
| Speed | Boat speed through the water, speed over ground, VMG | SOG needs only GPS; boat speed needs a paddlewheel |
| Direction | Course over ground, heading magnetic, heading true | COG needs only GPS; heading needs a compass |
| Water | Depth, depth under keel, water temperature | Depth sounder, temperature sensor |
| Boat attitude | Heel, fore/aft trim, rudder angle | Motion sensor, rudder feedback |
| Navigation | Bearing and distance to waypoint, cross-track error, VMG to waypoint | A route active on the plotter |
| Special | Wind rose, wind shift indicator, target wind angle | Wind data |
Depth under keel is depth plus your keel offset, which SailStats applies from the transducer offset your instruments send where they send one. Polar-based channels — percentage of target speed, and target boat speed — need a polar for your boat and are not in the app yet.
What is the wind rose?
A single tile showing true and apparent wind together on one dial, with the boat at the centre and exterior arrows on the ring for each. It is the fastest way to read the difference between where the wind is and where it feels like it is — which is the difference that tells you what the boat is actually doing.
It works as a tile on the dashboard or full screen, with your chosen channels read out in the corners.
Can I have more than one layout?
Yes, and you should. What you want in front of you on a Wednesday evening race is not what you want on a delivery: racing wants wind angle, target speed and the shift indicator; cruising wants depth, SOG and a course. Build both and switch between them.
What are the per-tile options?
- Tack colours — tints the tile by which tack you are on, so a header reads as a colour change before you have processed the number. Off by default.
- Chart fill — fills the area under a tile’s trend chart. Off by default; some people find it easier to read at a glance, some find it noisy.
Both are per-tile rather than global, so you can have the one tile you really watch behave differently from the rest.
Can I read it in sunlight?
There is a high-visibility mode that raises contrast and weight for bright conditions. Combined with the screen at full brightness it is readable in most daylight. Direct overhead sun on a glossy screen defeats everything eventually — shade matters more than any software setting.
Do units change my recorded data?
No. Everything is stored canonically — knots, nautical miles, metres — and converted only when it is drawn on screen. Switching units changes what you read and nothing about what was recorded, so you can move between knots and km/h freely without corrupting a season of history.