William G. Andersen wrote:
Here's my follow up, for the benefit of those of you who, like me try
to learn something from this newsgroup.
I had suspected corrosion in the DB9 connector on the end of the
Furuno radar cable, where the wires to the radio are also connected,
because , even though we checked for continuity, we thought the NMEA
signal isn't strong, and may not be getting through.
I decided to try, one more time, as long as we had the boat out last
night. I verified the GPS was set for NMEA/NMEA and lowered the BAUD
rate to 4800. Bingo!
NMEA data displayed on radar and VHF-FM radio.
I never paid any attention to the BAUD rate before. I will from now
on, because it's evident that the radio and radar don't listen to
higher speeds. How nice to have course and speed displayed on the
radar again - where almost anyone in the boat can see it. The GPS is
a handheld, mounted for the helmsman and difficult for others to read.


"Wayne.B" wrote in message
...
On Thu, 7 Apr 2005 15:20:46 -0700, "William G. Andersen"
wrote:

What would you check in this situation?

===================================

Check the "setup" options on your GPS to ensure that the data out
function or settings have not been inadvertantly changed.

I had a similar problem with an Oziexplorer installation a couple of years
ago. It simply would not communicate on NMEA settings. The boat owner had
taken out his yacht and had changed the comms configuration in Ozi to
115,200, as he "wanted the boat to appear to go faster!". As soon as I
adjusted the baud rate back to 4800, the sentences started to flow.

Problem is, I deal with sailors to whom a laptop is "hyper-technology", and
they are trying to master the usage of same at an age when most other guys
(including myself) have retired.

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Dennis Pogson wrote:

snip
I had a similar problem with an Oziexplorer installation a couple of years
ago. It simply would not communicate on NMEA settings. The boat owner had
taken out his yacht and had changed the comms configuration in Ozi to
115,200, as he "wanted the boat to appear to go faster!". As soon as I
adjusted the baud rate back to 4800, the sentences started to flow.

Problem is, I deal with sailors to whom a laptop is "hyper-technology", and
they are trying to master the usage of same at an age when most other guys
(including myself) have retired.

I've had similar experiences. Once I discovered the use Hyperterminal
(set to 4800/8/N/1) for NMEA testing I found I could get some kind of
data flow if the serial connection was working. If there was a
mysterious but repetitious garble, that was symptom of mismatched baud
rates.

As an aside, there is a program named tty.exe (came as part of one of
M$'s Win-CE software development kits or something like that) that can
be used in the absence of Hyperterminal on PDAs running various versions
of Win-CE. Tty.exe is mentioned on Dale DePriest's WinCE Hardware for
Navigation page: http://www.gpsinformation.org/dale/P...cehardware.htm.

Jack

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