Lap top navigation.

[stnick]

For My Morgan 384 we purchased a lap top for nav station ,navigation. My wife even took the Coast guard navigation courses she's in her 4th course now.
We have the garmon 700 touch screen. Its wifi friendly , we are trying to get the lap top it to talk to the GPS.
I do have a nema network0183 or something close to that . Can i get a wireless router and connect or do i need to hard wire it ?
Ever electronics shop i call has no clue. Called West Marine for advice they gave me a guy who had no clue either. ??
I know power boaters that are doing this and they are not in my area any more !!
Can some one point me in the right direction.
Should i call Garmon ?
Lee/ Wind Rose M 384 Tarpon springs fl

[denverd0n]

Looked up the Garmin GPSMap 700. Don't see anything about it being "wifi friendly." Are you sure? Do you have a manual for it? If not, that's where I would start. I expect that you could get one by contacting Garmin.

[hellosailor]

NMEA 18x is pretty much just a serial data bus, similar to the RS-232 bus that computers used to have over ten years ago. Still works just fine, but it is thoroughly obsolete in the computer industry.

You might find a NMEA 18x to wifi "bridge", which takes the NMEA data stream and broadcasts it as a WiFi signal. But really, NMEA 18x is so easy to wire...all you need is a decent quality 3-conductor wire, and then a serial port (or these days, a serial-to-usb adapter) on the laptop.

One reason that RS-232 and NMEA 18x have been obsoleted, is that you will then still have to manually set and match the speed, parity, and bit depth on the devices using the NMEA/serial data.

So if you can find an NMEA-to-WiFi bridge, go for it. Otherwise, it might be time to look at updating.

[stnick]

i looked this morning My Garmon 70S is "wifi friendly" I had gone to the home screen and scrolled thru the choices and I had had the wifi choice turned off ! DAH !
I'm still learning this thing so far I just love it !

[valhalla360]

If you have somewhere where you can still get the gps signal, consider bying a $20 USB-GPS. That way you have independent signal sources if your primary GPS goes down.

If your phone has GPS, you can check for a signal by putting the phone inside where you would otherwise put the puck.

[Time2Go]

The easiest thing to do is to buy a GPS Puck and plug it into a USB port.
Simple, easy, cheap, I did this with a generic Samsung laptop using
SEACLEAR navigation software. Worked like a charm from NJ to Fla.
I found the guys at the GPS Store to be helpfull

[Jammer Six]

The problem with using a laptop for navigation is power.

[Captain Bill]

Garmin owners manuals are practically useless in my experience. The hardware is actually pretty good. The owners manuals don't even mention some of the features built into the hardware/software. For instance my wife recently picked got a great deal on a Garmin GPSmap 78SC . It comes with a USB port. Yet the manual makes no mention of the fact that you can output NMEA sentences through the USB port. If I did not have previous experience with Garmin documentation (or lack there of) I would have said it could not do it. So I started going through menus and found the settings that put the position information out the USB port. In about 30 minutes of manually walking through the menus I was up and running with my position speed and other information showing up on my Coastal Explorer. It also worked great on my OpenCPM. Whats more when it's plugged into the USB it uses the power from the USB port and not the batteries. Imagine that. I run my Coastal Explorer on an old EEEpc from ASUS that is 12 volts and runs off my house batteries, so power is not a problem for either the computer or GPS. The GPS I normally use with this set up is a Garmin GPS18, but now I can use the 78sc as a backup as well. I use the chart plotter at the helm for steering and the netbook for navigation. I have the netbook set up so that when I close the cover the screen turns off and it uses very little power. I also have a 23 inch TV/monitor that I can plug in when I want a larger screen, though 99% of the time the netbook screen works just fine. I download fresh official NOAA charts onto the netbook when I am getting ready to move. The primary problem with the netbook and most other laptops is that it is not sunlight readable, at least not easily and must be used below deck.

[casique8]

I have a program navpro in my labtop comes with a GPS antenna works good

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