Yeoman / Lowrance HDS interoperable ?

[winsbury]

Went to the London boat show, which incidentally was mostly a waste of time & money; dont even get me started on the appalling car park whose entrance barriers are lower than a Land Rover Discovery without a roof rack if the signage is to be believed. Anyway, the highlight was that I had a demo of the Yeoman Sport which looks to me a fab way of keeping a paper chart backup and for transferring waypoints into the HDS gps plotter. However, the salesman sucked his teeth when I said I have a Lowrance HDS plotter so I kept my wallet tucked away. A little more research shows that Yeoman's website does not specifically list the HDS as compatible although receiving positional data from almost any GPS is pretty straightforward. I think the key issue is whether the Yeoman will send and receive waypoints with the HDS. Lowrance certainly seems to suggest that this is possible as there is a setting to decide if the HDS accepts waypoints via NMEA (both versions.)

So, the question is, has anyone successfully connected a Yeoman to an HDS and managed to transfer waypoints bi-directionally ?

 

[FWB]

I bought a Yeoman Sport 10 years ago, pre chartplotter days.
The very first time I used it I realised what a complete waste of time and money it was.
On my charts I had drawn all the likely routes I would take from my base in Falmouth.
I drew 5 mile marks to and from the waypoints which made up the routes.
The Yeoman was driven by the now very basic but excellent Garmin GPS 12XL.
It became instantly obvious that the Yeoman was completely superfluous to navigation.
All that was needed for an instant position fix on the chart was distance to the next waypoint and any cross track error, this is displayed on the gps set. The mouse on the Yeoman just told me what I already knew.
I have never used it since but, now in the days of chartplotters, it is a way of holding my back up paper charts, albeit an expensive holder.

So the question of whether the Yeoman will link to a chartplotter is for me an irrelevant one.
Forgive me for not answering your question, but I do question why anyone would buy a Yeoman unless they have no chartplotter and just wander around out of sight of land with no particular course set.

Addendum:
The ability to transfer waypoints from a GPS to a chart via the Yeoman might be useful but it's an expensive way of doing something that can be done quickly manually.

 

[superheat6k]

I have a yeoman set that came with my boat. I have used it once on passage but prefer to use my modern plotter and simply keep a periodic plot on the paper chart so I can revert to the traditional mode of navigation if the electronics fail.

On a power boat travelling at or above 15kn and especially in crowded or confined waters Yeoman is just too slow and cumbersome and not a patch on my Garmin GPSMAP touchscreen display.

I did have a Lowrance HDS7 for a short period until I gave up trying to get the NMEA to talk to my VHF / AIS, but this was because the HDS only has one I/O channel. It should work fine with the Yeoman on NMEA0183 but correct connection of the wiring is essential, and note only one device can transmit to other receiving devices on NMEA0183, so if they won't talk check you don't have other equipment trying to talk out the same sentences at the same time.

Yeoman is a nice bit of kit albeit a bit old fashioned and keeps you focused on more traditional nav which if GPS ever goes down a lot of people will be completely stuck. So for that persevere to get it working but I doubt you will use it too much.

 

[prv]

Completely agree that a Yeoman is unsuited to a fast powerboat. However, I'm a big fan of the device at sailing-boat speeds. I like looking at a whole chart, I like to be able to draw lines and notes directly on the chart, and I like to be able to measure and plot and generally interact in the real world (eg with ruler and dividers) rather than through the medium of buttons and a screen. I'm by no means a Luddite (I'm a software developer by trade), I just prefer that way of doing things.

If others don't that's completely fine, I'm not out to convert anybody, but if you're undecided I wouldn't want the negative reports to put you off without a balancing view from the other direction.

The yeoman should interoperate with anything that talks NMEA 0813. Special worries about compatibility were largely a thing of the early days before manufacturers started following the protocol properly.

Have to say I don't really understand the point of the Sport version - it's designed for open boats but that's another case where a chartplotter makes more sense now. The Pro is the one to go for, or the Compact if your chart table is too narrow.

One thing worth noting - the yeoman design hasn't changed for over a decade now, so there's no real benefit to buying new over second hand. They do come up on eBay from time to time - or it sounds like Dylan might be prepared to swap his for a decent chart folder

Pete

 

[jon]

so there's no real benefit to buying new over second hand. They do come up on eBay

Just be cautious, I bought a secondhand Sport and the electronic 'mat' became faulty and had to be replaced. Well over £100 and that was !2 years ago.
If, like me, you use the Admiralty Folios they have the Yeoman reference points printed which is ideal. The sport is waterproof and handy in the cockpit as back up, and I do like paper charts.

 

[prv]

If, like me, you use the Admiralty Folios they have the Yeoman reference points printed which is ideal.

Yep; the Imray folios do too. A newish Yeoman should have all their locations preloaded into memory, for Imray and Admiralty. Although if it doesn't, it's not hard to add them manually.

Pete

 

[winsbury]

Thanks for the advice everyone, I have seen these around on other peoples boats but didnt quite know what they did and few people seem to discuss it so they do seem to be used sparingly so I hadnt had a chance to see one in action hence getting the demo at the show. I have to say the functionality versus price is out of sync in todays hitech multi-functional age so a secondhand one would be more realistic for me given the amount of use it will get.

Mine is a relatively slow sailboat so I dont suffer the time constraints that a power boater would have, I'm fairly new to (non-dinghy) sailing but my background in mountaineering where a gps is helpful but mapwork remains essential to ensure safe routes are chosen and as a backup - more than once Ive had a GPS show me in an adjacent valley or had the batteries fail or a simple layline to the next objective would lead over cliff. Although the hazards are different, the principles of planning on a map and transferring the routes to the gps accurately are the same. I also think the Yeoman would also be useful for other members of the crew to help put the hourly marker on the map; I was impressed by ease of transferring planned routes into the GPS, much easier than trying to precisely set a waypoint on the small plotter screen.

As to the sport version, on my particular boat the nav table is also the galley, so my thought was that while one person prepares the meal, the other can have the plotter ( and perhaps a glass of wine ) while at anchor up in the cockpit to plan the next leg / day.

I currently have nmea2000 linking the Lowrance gps and vhf with a separate ais receiver feeding the 3800baud nmea 0183 port on the gps. My understanding is that the remaining unused nmea 0183 port on the vhf can multiplex signals into the nmea2000 network which would overcome the limitation of the number of ports on the plotter given that there would be two NMEA0183 transmitters: the yeoman and the ais. Failing that there are NMEA0183 muxes which will do the job but admittedly they are not cheap. So at a physical level I'm reasonably confident the connections can be made, but the question remains whether the HDS and Yeoman will properly inter-network assuming the physical wiring is correct.

If somene has one I could experiment with and perhaps wants to sell for a sensible price I would be happy to give it a go and report back.

 

[jimbaerselman]

One of the major advantages of the Yeoman over modern plotters has been missed in this conversation.

It is intuitive to use. Any crew person can use it to plot a fix, or work out a course and distance to a place, after just two minutes demonstration. After five minutes, they can set up waypoints and download them to a deck display where the route can be followed by the helm to arrive at a revised destination. After 10 minutes they can set up a new chart as well.

And this is a really big screen, whose mode doesn't change when you tap the wrong button.

So, to some degree, it's a "get you home" device for non-navigators.

Just a thought . . .