[Guest]

As a powerboater I've been lucky, as my wheelhouse is fully enclosed. I've been using a Powerbook G3 Pismo, but did not like having my powerbook out on the dash area, rough water, screen not very viewable. Decided to try this, I bought a docking station for my Pismo off of eBay and then bought a Dell 15" LCD monitor. The Dell came with an external power supply, AC to 12VDC. I just cut off the AC part and connected the remaining cable directly to 12VDC on my boat. Now my Pismo is connected to the docking station in under the dash, which in turn is connected to the LCD on my dash. The LCD is mounted there using a RAM Mount. To control GPSNavX on my LCD I found a dual mode optical mouse with a twist, it has a trackball instead of a wheel. This is in turn mounted between my throttle controls. I start up the Pismo and then put it to sleep, so I can close the lid of the powerbook, and then click the trackball mouse and then everythings comes back to life on my LCD. I'm also using a USGlobalStat BU-353 USB GPS, this system works great and I was very pleasently surprised to find the LCD is readable in indirect sunlight. The hard part was finding an LCD monitor using a AC to 12VDC external power supply, as most LCD's have this set up inside the monitor. They are a round but you need to keep you eyes open at used monitor/computor stores.

Patrick