MacSailing.net

Just came off a 9 day cruise in PNW waters on my Islander 28 sailboat.

I have a set of Autohelm ST-50 instruments. Autopilot head is acting up and will get sent back to Raymarine soon.

My "old" Garmin GPS48 has been having weird initialization errors, has to "autolocate" fairly often, I think maybe there's a ROM battery that's dead or something. I really like it, as it's small, accurate, and has a sudo-plotter that at least shows me my relationship to my course as well as major marine markers. Totally waterproof, I have it mounted on the binacle. So I'll probably have it updated as well.

I have iNavx on my phone, and will upgrade to MacENC so that I can get a more accurate plot from the MacBook.

But I would like to be able to see my MacGPS/MacBook closer to the cockpit, and or just not have it tied down to the serial cable to the GPS. This winter I will probably also add an AIS system, and would like to tie the system together.

I was wondering about a Bluetooth GPS and/or a Bluetooth multiplexer to tie into my instruments? Need something small and low-cost, This isn't the Queen Mary, I need to keep it simple.

Jack

I use a Shipmodul BT Mux and it works great. Accepts NMEA data from GPS, Instruments and AIS, outputs NMEA data to Autopilot.

http://www.shipmodul.com/en/miniplex-bt.html

Once the NMEA data is into MacENC it is rebroadcast over an AdHoc WiFi network to iNavX running on iPod Touch or iPhone.

Nice, but $532...