does anybody have experiance w/ gyro compass? These are mainly an areonautical instument. but i found that with all the movement on our cats it difficult to get an accurate compass reading. I seem to be constantly "marking" then take an avrage. The vertical mount of this style of compass has some appealling qualities. From what i'm reading about these with a little "McGyver" enginering it might be a neat tool on the boat. I'm a safty equipment freak so it would be a tool i would still carry a normal magnetic compass and a GPS. but for ease of use while sailing (hands free and accurate). it seems like it would work nicely. any opinions or information whould be appeciated.

Gyro compasses systems used in aircraft have either a directional gyro manually updated from a standard compass or a flux valve updating a directional gyro which in turn drives an intrument in the panel with a compass card. Powered by 14 or 28VDC some also require 26/115VAC 400Hz, in addition, some will require a vacuum source as well to spin the gyro. Essentially the gyro is used to stabilise the compass card, eg you turn 90degrees in the plane and the card turns 90degrees because of the gyro, long term errors from the gyro are corrected by the flux valve via a slaving accessory. Solid state flux valves as used in a TackTick are used at the low end of aviation and the high end along with ring laser gyros, talking 10's of thousand of dollars for a system.
So unless you want to carry a battery, inverter, compressor and spend lots of money, using an aircraft system is out of the question.
A Tacktick is the way to go http://www.tacktick.com/products/product_view.asp?prod=29
or one of the many other marine systems available if you want to connect to other systems,

Darryn