Raymarine Raystar 125 alternatives?

[Wandering Star]

Has anyone succesfully connected an alternative GPS antenna such as the Evermore SA320 to a Raymarine C series Chartplotter instead of using the Raymarine Raystar 125. The Raymarine offering costs £250+ whereas the Evermore one is around £90 and claims to be wholly compatible.

Any thoughts or advice welcomed.

Cheers, Brian.

 

[pvb]

Anything which outputs GPS data in NMEA will successfully connect to a C-series plotter.

 

[wizard]

Anything which outputs GPS data in NMEA will successfully connect to a C-series plotter.

Can confirm that. As you have the choice of connecting to Seatalk or NMEA.
I have got a switchover to my Garmin 152 in case of Raystar failure and have also tested various others just in case.

 

[pvb]

Just as an afterthought, one reason the Raystar 125 is more expensive than some alternatives is that it can output GPS data in SeaTalk format. This can be useful if you want to use the NMEA input on a C-series plotter for something else, without having to buy a multiplexer. For example, I use the NMEA input on my C-series for the fast heading sensor input, and use SeaTalk for the GPS input.

 

[Paragon]

Have used the Evermore with no problems at all, currently feeding Raymarine and Yeoman Plotter with no issues.

 

[Wandering Star]

Thanks very much for clearing this up, I did suspect the NMEA would allow any GPS device with NMEA output to work but I wanted to be sure. Thanks too for confirming specificallybthat the Evermore GPS antenna will do the job.

Now, for the second part of my education, I'm going to make a new post about the need for a multiplexer (with recommendations or ideas) to handle input of more than one source of NMEA to my C70 chartplotter.

Cheers, Brian.