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I agree with Dockhead and without a diagram and some help from Brookhouse I could not have made this work. No crashes. And there are stand alone devices which don't "need" to talk and listen.
I was smitten by the idea of the MFD when my Vigil radar went south and the company was out of biz. I bought the C80 and scanner and it was a stand alone radar for a while.
Then I decided to send the GPS output of my CP170 to the C80 and I bought some charts and had two plotters using the same antenna. I then decided to get a ray GPS antenna so I had redundancy and receive the NASA ais as a birthday gift. That's when things got complex and I needed the MUX and the Seatalk interface box. Once that was sorted out I connected the compass so I had both heading and COG on the C80.
I do like the radar overlays on the charts, but I am not a fan of the C80 as it's user interface sucks and I mostly use a hand held iQue3600 in the cockpit for chart reference since I single hand and can't be spending lots of time staring and playing with instruments down below. I typically punch in a waypoint which repeats to cockpit repeaters (both the KVH sail comp and a B&G NMEA repeater, for all the critical data - SOG, COG CTW, DTW, TTG and XTE.
Hopefully this system will work until the industry gets this data /network thing sorted out economically. YUCK
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