Will it work ?

[carlager]

I am considering replacing our old MFD with a Garmin 721 chartplotter.

Our autopilot Is a Geonav SC110. In the manual it says

This data line is a NMEA0183 input port. Be sure that the baud-rate is set to
4.800 and, at least, one of the following sentences is enabled:
[APA] or [APB] or [BOD+RMB] or [BOD+XTE] or [BOD+XTR].


The manual in the Garmin 721 says that the Garmin 721 will send the sentence GPAPB using NMEA

Hope someone can help with the following questions

1. Is GPAPB the same sentence as APB ?

2. Will the Garmin 721 be able to send data to the autopilot ?





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[muttnik]

Originally Posted by carlager

The manual in the Garmin 721 says that the Garmin 721 will send the sentence GPAPB using NMEA

Hope someone can help with the following questions

1. Is GPAPB the same sentence as APB ?

2. Will the Garmin 721 be able to send data to the autopilot ?

GPAPB is the same as APB. The first two characters are the "Talker ID". The "GP" here indicates that the sender is identifying itself as a GPS unit. The following 3 characters are the sentence, APB is "Auto Pilot sentence B", although that contradicts everything I ever learned from Starsky and Hutch.

The *actual* reference for this stuff is one of those antediluvian closed-source "standards", but thankfully we do have Eric Raymond's assembled free documentation:
NMEA Revealed

Will it work? Dunno but if the AP says it will work in receipt of APB and the 721 sends APB there's a chance. Double check with Garmin for leverage in getting a refund if it doesn't?

[carlager]

Thank you for your answer. I spoke with Garmin. They were confident that 721 would be able to communicate with the AP using the APB sentence in NMEA0183


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