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I have been looking at PolarView NS and I am very impressed with its capabilities. I want to inistall it on a Powerbook and would like to integrate it into a Raymarine suite (C-120W chart plotter, ST6001 autopilot, St60 and 70 instruments), essentially reading the Raymarine GPS signal and instrument NMEA data.
Is there a way to connect the PolarView program on my mac to the Raymarine SeaTalk/NMEA network?
Has anyone done this before?
many thanks
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Thanks for the quick reply.
Can PolarCOM function as a multiplexer to help parse out the various NMEA and/or Seatalk data? Or does the Raymarine unit do that?
thnx again.
-BH
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PolarCOM can function as a multiplexor, however the job of a multiplexor is to forward NMEA sentences from one port to another, no parsing involved in that functionality.
The devices I listed above will convert Seatalk to NMEA and vice versa.
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Okay, thanks.
I have decided to take your advice and go with the Raymarine unit. I think it is most likely to play nice with the rest of my system which is all Raymarine. This also limits cross-talk finger pointing among multiple vendors when something goes wrong.
I have two questions.
Question 1: what is the physical medium between the Raymarine SeaTalk/NMEA converter and my Mac? I see from the manual that the Raymarine unit has an RS-232 output. But there is no such thing on a mac laptop. Do I add an RS-232 to USB converter or...what? It also has a two-wire (+ and -) connector labeled "NMEA". What do I wire that to on my laptop?
Question 2: Does PolarView/PolarCom need to, or benefit from, sending NMEA data back to the converter's input side?
Many thanks for your help. I am pretty sure that there are many others trying to find the same answers.
-BH
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