Pascal wrote:

I friend has just bough a brand new system and have it installed into
his brand new 36 ft sailboat. The system comprises a Raymarine C80
Chart/Plotter, including the Radar and FishFinder and the plotter uses
Navionics Gold charts...snip

That Raymarine C80 uses Navionics Gold charts that are on CF cards
doesn't it?

I had a brief encounter with a C120 a while back and remember, in going
through the menus, that there were provisions for saving and retrieving
data to and from the CF card. I was using the chart plotter with a
Navionics chart card in place and not trying to save or retrieve any
user data to and from the card. The thought of accidently writing to
the card sort of scared me in fact.

Some cautions apply, writing to the wrong card (like your expensive
Navionics Gold chart card) or at the wrong time could overwrite
(destroy) the existing data on a card. Hopefully, the Navionics CF
chart cards are write protected or there are plenty of warnings.

But if the C80 will read and write data from and to "user" or "data" CF
cards, then it may be possible to load the Garmin data (which will
probably have to be reformatted first) to the CF card on a PC and then
retrieve it into the C80.

He has a Garmin GpsMap 276C and a GpsMap 76S and many tested wpts and
routes, and he wishes to transfer its to the new system, but he can not
have any information on how he could do this. How he can interface the
chart plotter with the PC in order to transfer the wpts and routes?
There is a cartridge adapter that could be read/writed in the PC? Wich
software he could use for this?

I'm sure that Raymarine would want you to use its RayTech RNS Pathfinder
software http://tinyurl.com/dz99j and put your PC in direct contact with
your C80 on a SeaTalk network. That entails more hardware and and
software as seen at that link.

I think the RayTech RNS software will use (read from/write to) CF cards
in any common CF card reader. Raymarine also sells a USB reader for the
proprietary C-Map cartridges that are used in some of its equipments.

There have been threads here before about the practicality of "do it
your self" networking on Raymarine equipments. If I recall right from
the threads here, the SeaTalk network is a variation on TCP/IP
networking. And that a network can be setup without purchasing all the
SeaTalk networking bells and whistles Raymarine expects you to use.

Please, any help would be apreciated.

I guess you friend has to first figure out if there is a migration path
(using utilities like GPS Utility, G7towin, etc.,) to move the data from
the Garmin format to a format that the C80 can read. That may or may
not require an intermediate Raymarine software such as RayTech RNS.

A secondary decision is to decide if he wants to have a PC on the boat
on a SeaTalk network. With that decided, he may want to study the
details of SeaTalk networking and either use SeaTalk networking hardware
or the do it yourself alternative

Your friend should not lose track of the fact that one of the primary
obligations of a boat owner is to keep adding money to the hole in the
water that he owns. :)

Cheers,

Jack

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