NASA Clipper Wind instrument repair
I stumbled across an entry in a ten-year-old logbook the other day. It recorded the fact that the NASA Clipper Wind was not working. I’ve battled with the instrument ever since. This season, the wind direction was way off and the speed didn’t work at all. I climbed the mast and replaced the vane and cups to no avail, so it was time to get assertive.
If you can solder it’s always worth taking things apart and having a go at repairing them (I first wrote about this in PBO February 2013). Often all you have to do is wiggle every connector you can find – they can get tarnished and fail to connect properly. In this case a new instrument would set me back about £250, while the sum total of the components I was going to replace came to less than £10. So in this article I’m not going to talk about identifying the failed components – unless you have an oscilloscope, you can’t do it – so I’ll just show you how to replace all possible failed parts. This approach may solve your problem and it may not, but risking £10 to save £250 seems like a good idea to me.
Understanding Clipper Wind
The NASA Clipper Wind Version I comprises a masthead unit and a display, which
