NASA GPS Repeater and OpenCPN - do they work? And pinout question

[mattonthesea]

I was idly wondering the other day whether a NASA GPS Repeater (currently an inert plug for an hole in the bulkhead) could be wired up to my OpenCPN setup and whether it would be useful. I say useful because when I wired it up to an old Garmin 12 its display was in tiny characters.

Questions:

Am I right in thinking that I would use pin number 3 (via USB to 232 for the data from OpenCPN to repeater?

Would the repeater display the dashboard info (can I dictate what is displayed)?

Thanks

 

[GHA]

Should be OK, from google the nasa reads just 3 sentences >

GSA for the fix of the satellites
RMC for the SOG and bearing
RMB for the waypoint distance, name, and track

So you'd need to get those out of the computer on a usb/serial device.

This site GPS: NASA Clipper [OpenCPN Manuals] suggests that opencpn struggles multiplexing the output but that's an old version, dunno. Might work fine just filtering those 3 sentences to the output. Dunno.

Or... what computer are you using? Installing signalk could be another option then you gain all the other benefits that signalk can do like saving to a database, it could handle the data side.

 

[rogerthebodger]

Have a look at NavMonPC. I ue it to multiplex inputs and output all the data to a virtual port to OpenCPN.

You can also output incoming data to real output ports with a USB RS232 converter.