Is the Si-Tex Profish III an NMEA "talker"?

[CharlesFCook]

Hi,

The boat I am working on has a Si-Tex Profish III fish finder. The display is getting a bit weak and we suspect it to fail (at a bad time). Our transducer is fine. It would cost us about $5,000 to haul the boat to install a new system. Plus we require a very long transducer because we are a wood boat and the fairing blocks. We are a 503(c)(3) non-profit organization and money is always tight. So I am stuck with the old transducer.

What I want to do is feed the depth info into our Garmin 740s. I have an email into Garmin about the compatibility of our transducer. At the very least I would need an 8pin to 6pin adapter cable.

Plan B would be to send NMEA data from the Profish unit to the Garmin. Does anyone know if the Profish III is an NMEA “talker”? I have an email into Si-Tex but wanted to ask here also to try and keep things moving.

Thanks for your help.
Charlie

[Paul Elliott]

Here is the Profish III manual: http://www.si-tex.com/product_manual...hIIIManual.pdf

It looks like there is only NMEA input (GPS data optionally sent to the Profish). In the specifications, only the GGA, GLL, GSV, RMA, RMC, and LCGTD (NMEA) sentences are noted, and these are for GPS data. There is a bidirectional RS232 port, but the manual doesn't seem to describe the port function.