Quote:
Originally Posted by christhefish
is it possible to connect a gps aerial and AIS to the laptop How and what would I need????
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Yes.
What you need depends on what you've got and what else you want. Whatever else, you'll need a
chartplotter program which can display AIS data and
charts for the UK.
OpenCPN can display AIS but you'll need to buy
charts and the only
legal and relatively up to date ones which will
work with it are the ones from
visitmyharbour
There are
commercial programs which include charts such as the Belfield one (there's several others going up in
price from here) but check that anything you consider supports AIS (this one does):
Belfield Software - Chart Plotter
Next you need a source of AIS and GPS data. If you've already got an AIS unit, how you connect it will depend on what outputs it has. If it has USB you can probably just
plug it into the laptop. If a 9 pin
serial port you need a
serial to USB converter (unless your laptop has old
school serial ports). If it just has bare wires you'll need an rs422 to serial converter (~£10 on ebay).
If you don't have AIS and need to buy it, if you also have a
chartplotter that you want to connect it to, buy an AIS unit which as well as connectivity to the chartplotter has USB output, as this will make connecting to your laptop easy. If you neither have nor want a chartplotter device other than your laptop, you can buy USB AIS receivers. I have no experience of this one (so can't personally recommend it) but it's listed on the OpenCPN site:
Radar Gadgets - AIS marine radio receiver - Virtual Radar
There are others. Shop around.
You need to connect a
VHF aerial to an AIS receiver, so you can either add a dedicated AIS
antenna somewhere or put a splitter in your
VHF cable. Prices for splitters seem to start from £80, although they are built into some of the more expensive AIS receiver units (though not the little USB dongles). Note that people will point out that this will slightly degrade your VHF signal. Most people won't notice.
For GPS, your simplest option us just to buy a dedicated USB GPS dongle. These are £30 delivered from ebay. Gives you a backup if the boat's GPS fails, it's portable, and if you're not technically minded it saves a lot of faffing about and probably the cost of a USB to serial converter.
That's kind of the basic story but as Neo said, there really are so many options depending on what you've got now and what you want to do in the future. The minimum you could (reasonably, tricks with SDRs excluded :-) do this for with no existing kit is about £300:
budget chartplotter+charts, GPS dongle, AIS dongle, VHF splitter + coax connectors. If you have AIS already it's 2/3rds that. e.g. OpenCPN, visitmyharbour charts, USB GPS and possibly a serial to USB converter if your AIS doesn't output USB. <£100.