Hello All,
I'm new to Panbo as our electronics have served us fairly well over the last 8 years cruising through the Pacific. But now I have to jump into something... but what? In advance, sorry for this long-winded post.
I have Navman/Northstar instruments and autopilot. Everything is pretty good except the Navman 3150 Wind which has never worked correctly and I'm tired of throwing money at it. When it did work it interfaced nicely with our excellent Navman 3380 G-Pilot.
I'm thinking of going with either a Raymarine ST60+ Wind or an i60 Wind. Of course I'll have to jump into NMEA 2000 (Seatalk NG) with the i60. I'm going to install a multiplexer (Brookhouse eMux probably) but would still need a to convert the Seatalk NG into NMEA 0183 so I can get wind data to the autopilot. Add to that a desire for a backup depthsounder or fishfinder and I start to have a lot of decisions to make.
I currently have NMEA 0183 data connected between GPS, RADAR, VHF, AP, NMEA Repeater, and Depth/Speed. I also have an 0183 Vesper AIS Transponder not yet in the mix.
I really need a product that could take all protocols and multiplex them and spit out data over TCP/IP to a router. But that doesn't seem to exist. So the question is, is it worth it to add a NMEA 2000 to the mix? We try to keep things a bit simple onboard but that is more and more difficult in the electronics world.
Many thanks for any advice.
Cheers,
Bruce
s/v Migration
Phuket, Thailand