NMEA Question

[Moose]

I am thinking about buying SeaPro lite, for my laptop to use as a Primary Chartplotter, and then use my 7 year old Furono Chartplotter as a back up.
Now then,,, I want to be able to control the Autopilot from both Chartplotters, but the Autopilot computer only has one NMEA input. Can I just put the NMEA output from the laptop in to the one input along with the Chartplotter i.e 2 wires going into one Input. Or would I have to disconnect one wire to use the Furono C/P if the Laptop broke up or something. Am I right in thinking that I only need to plug in the Green and the Yellow wire from the Laptop into the Autopilot?
Last Question, Should I have SeaPro's "litecharts" or should I have Admiralty ARCS charts?
Thanks

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Moose

 

[Moose]

Obviously nobody knows!!!!
Perhaps I should ask easier questions

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Moose

 

[jfm]

You cannot plug two NMEA talkers (ie your laptop and your Furuno) into the same NMEA in port on the autopilot. Well, you can do it, without harm, but it wont work. The sentences spoken by each talker will not be sequenced and therefore will overspeak each other and corrupt the signal.

Someone said in a recent thread that you can buy a small black box that will accept two NMEA inputs and give out a clean single NMEA output, sequenced. But it might be simpler just to fit a simple selector switch, so you choose only one talker at once.

I can't say if those colours work, becos there are many conventions. You need to find the NMEA out and ground from your laptop, and connect those to the NMEA in and ground on the a/pilot. NMEA out from the laptop is pin 3 of the serial plug, which is the centre pin on the row of 5. Ground is pin 5, which you are probably already using as ground for the NMEA into the laptop (from your GPS)

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[qsiv]

As the cabling has been addressed I'll go for the charts ...

Seapros native charts (they're LiveChart not LiteCharts!), are vector charts. This means they have their own look and feel, and you can turn features (light sectors etc) on and off to remove clutter. You also get a stepless scaling function.

The ARCS charts are proper pukka HM Admiralty charts, just as they appear on paper - you cant selectively hide data as they are raster (scanned) charts.

In short look at both and make your own choice - it's not so much that one is better, rather that they are different.

Me - I use livecharts.

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