Sonar / Fishfinder options

[thematt]

Hey folks,


I'm looking into making the switch to opencpn vs. upgrading my aging garmin system. I think opencpn supports everything I need, but I have some confusion around sonar / fishfinder.


In short is there a way for opencpn to display the sounder screen from and old gsd22 remote sounder? If not opencpn is there another way to display this or am I locked into garmin ecosystem if I want to use that feature?


Any and all help advice is appreciated!

[Hakan]

The Garmin sounder screen would be a Garmin device option only.
The GSD22 digital is connected to a Garmin network by a IP-RJ45 plug. What's in that network protocol is not clear from the user's manual but probably nothing useful for OCPN like NMEA0183. It can possibly be figured out with a network sniffer like wireshark but it's not obvious.

Unless anyone else has Garmin network experiences to share the only way might be to use a Garmin device to view the display and possible transfer NMEA depth data to OCPN by a serial connection or similar.

[Corsair63]

Having the data from the echo-sounder is more or less quite easy if the device has a 0183 either N2k connection.

what I understand from thematt question is to get the sounder screen integrated in opencpn, that would be marvellous, but for the time being I could not see such option, it should be something similar like RADAR plugin but showing the depth, quality of bottom, fish under the transducer, etc. in a opencpn window.

let's dream about.

I'm still dreaming to interface the Furuno RADAR to O, but Furuno is rather closed systems.

[thematt]

Thank folks, you understand what I'm after.


Sounds like moving to a fully open system is not possible while keeping the sounder / finder options unless packet sniff what that unit (GSD22) is sending to the display and writing my own plugin. Probably much easier to get a small older unit as a second display if I was so inclined.


Thanks

[Pyro]

Have you checked out the openecho project?

Pretty much turning old depth sounders into capable sonars and fish finders!
And host a wide range of older depth finders you got to check with them on discord it still relatively new but if you can get data out the sonar this could work.

They got an old 150khz sounder to show pretty high-res scan which could be interesting for some sailors that still have that old analog klunky box.

From what i've seen it doesn't fully integrate with openCPN you will need a second monitor and run their sonar viewer to get the beautiful sonar waterfall-view. The software also has a simple webserver sending nmea depth over udp so you can still get depth data on openCPN if you decide to rock a single.

[Pyro]

Check out the openecho project.

Turning old depth sounders into capable fish finders.

[thematt]

Thanks folks! I haven't heard of that project before, but looks exactly like what I'm after, or at least thinking about. Totally fine with have a second screen / window on a MFD. I'll spend some time seeing if it will work for my needs.

[Baikal]

There is a great multifunctional solution!
https://github.com/koggertech/KoggerApp
https://github.com/koggertech/Kogger-Protocol
https://kogger.tech/product/basic-2d-sonar-2/
It just needs to be integrated