Sorry for delay in replying. Couldn't check it out till the weekend. Bags of
input from a GPS to the HyperTerminal, but nothing from the ST60 Multi. I
think it could be faulty

Thanks for steering me towards the HyperTerminal. I had never heard of it.

Phil


"Jack Erbes" wrote in message
...
Phil Stanton wrote:
Hi Wout

Thanks for the information. I will definitely investigate this further,
as in addition to the depth problem, I am having problems getting my
Laptop to talk to the Autopilot. May be a wiring fault, but apparently
the ST60 multi instrument has NMEA In and Out.

A good way to trouble shoot NMEA data problems is to use the Hyperterminal
communications utility included with Windows. That will show you the NMEA
data flow as scrolling ascii text strings. And the strings can even be
saved to a text file for later study.

To use it, select the COM port your NMEA data is on in the "Connect
using:" box. Then change the settings to 4800 baud, 8 data bits, parity
to none, and stop bits to 1. If your NMEA data is at a different baud
rate you may have to change that, the display will be repeated garbles
when that happens. Sometimes you can check the setup on your NMEA talkers
to see what baud rate is being used, they all need to be the same.

Seeing the NMEA data strings tells you your laptop setup is working and
can help you isolate the problem.

There is a known problem with Windows misidentifying a GPS or NMEA input
as a serial mouse. If you go to the device manager find a serial mouse
there, disable it and leave it disabled and that will not happen again.

Jack

--
Jack Erbes in Ellsworth, Maine, USA - jackerbes at adelphia dot net
(also receiving email at jacker at midmaine.com)

Phil Stanton wrote:
Sorry for delay in replying. Couldn't check it out till the weekend. Bags of
input from a GPS to the HyperTerminal, but nothing from the ST60 Multi. I
think it could be faulty

Thanks for steering me towards the HyperTerminal. I had never heard of it.


You're welcome. Its been a freebie with Windows as long as I can
remember, great to use as a console for talking to various devices like
switches and routers, good for testing modems, and trouble shooting some
other devices.

As an added note, someone on another group pointed out to me that
Hyperterminal will not always work as I described it. It will work for
receive only connections but if the sending device expects that there
will two way communications it will not or may not work. I'm not that
smart about RS-232 communications and can't further explain that but it
sounds reasonable to me. Nothing else in Windows is guaranteed to
always work, why should that? :)

But it has been a good trouble shooting tool for me in checking out GPS
to PC connections.

Do you know that your ST-60 is communicating in a RS-232 serial mode?
If that is a SeaTalk instrument or in that mode, it won't work because
that is Raymarine's proprietary flavor of RS-232 or something like that.

Jack

--
Jack Erbes in Ellsworth, Maine, USA - jackerbes at adelphia dot net
(also receiving email at jacker at midmaine.com)