What a great organization. My email about using a Garmin GPS 48 on my
KVH
instruments really paid off. Basically after several attempts to make
the two work
together, I first called KVH and was alternatively told that it either
would not work
or would work only with a $595 NMEA concentrator. The guys at West
Marine had the
decency to suggest that it wouldn't work, but at the same time admitted
that they just
did not know.
Several responses to my Santana.org email basically suggested that my
GPS was not
sending the right NMEA (2.0 or 1.5) or was not in sending mode. This
turned out to
be dead on.
The first thing I did was to go to the GPS 48 interface page and found a
mode labeled
NMEA/NMEA. After setting this, I purchased a cigarette lighter
interface from Radio
Shack to go with my existing GPS 48 data cable. I followed the
directions in both
the GPS and KVH SAILCOMP manuals, wired the whole mess together and
plugged it in.
I should mention that my SAILCOMP is wired to my KVH Quardo (depth and
speed)
brainbox. I turned on the instruments, set the GPS to go to a waypoint
and happily
observed that when in navigation mode the SAILCOMP did indeed report the
current course and the course to waypoint. As wired the Quadro system
also
produced velocity over ground, distance to waypoint, course to waypoint,
and side tracking.
I was very pleased.
Probably worth noting that the GPS outputs NMEA 2.0 and 1.5. I left it
on 2.0
and all still seems to work just fine.
The long cable lets me keep my GPS on deck while sailing so I can change
waypoints or
whatever directly from the cockpit.
Thanks to all who responded to my request. I really appreciate the help.
Bee Bednar
Sea Bee
Received on Sun Nov 11 07:09:11 2001