Odyssey Time Zero Nobeltec System

[St. Elsewhere]

Do any of you have knowledge or experience to share on this upgrade offer from Nobeltec? It is built on the Time Zero products code base.

Last Chance to get Odyssey for $199!

The offer runs to the end of February, and includes charts for all of the US. but the Canadian west coast coverage costs an additional $150 or $300.

[djcameron]

I recently acquired Nobeltec Odyssey (2/2012). After two months of frustration, it is unusable. It can not receive a GPS signal from any modern USB devices. Evenidently it will onlyh work if your computer has a serial port (modern laptops don't even have serial ports anymore). Even with a serial port, I don't know if the software will work. I have tried to get it to recognize the signal from a new Garmin eTrexChx, Garmin 450T, and a Delorme GPS antenna. No success with any of the devices. They all send a good signal that my $39 Delorme Streets software works with flawlessly. I have called Nobeltec support four times and Garmin 3 times. Today after 2.5 hours Nobeltec gave up and said that they simply can't make their software work. Unfortunately, after two months of frustration and over 100 hours of effort, I am beyond the 30 day return timeframe and can't return the product. I am now out $800 for the software and proprietary charts that are essentially useless for navigation.

The software has very little help built in and most features must be learned by trial and error. It is not easy to use for planning and without the ability to use for navigation, it is useless. They are at least a decade behind modern state of the art technology. If anyone has a solution, I would be very interested in hearing it.

[St. Elsewhere]

djcameron sorry to hear of your difficulties. I did acquire their Odyssey upgrade, but kept VNS 10.7 as well. I installed a new Win 7 64 bit, quad core computer, but is is still getting serial GPS, Instrument, Autopilot, and AIS data through a SeaLevel RS232 4 port to USB converter. Odyssey and VNS are both working normally with this arrangement. I grant you that it is a 13 year old physical data connection with new Sea Level Win 7 drivers installed.

I hope that you find a solution.