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)