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rieraney

Please bear with me - my new boat is decades ahead of any boat I've had before and I'm trying to learn. I've always had the simplest nav equipment - PC, serial GPS and AIS connected to it as well as Pactor modem and SSB. I'm a software person, not great with hardware so I'm unlikely to build my own interface boards! But willing to try simple things.

My new system consists of an E-80 plotter at the steering binnacle, and an integrated radar, ais and gps as well as depth sounder, wind speed, maybe something else. Inside my boat there are 2 boxes, one marked Raymarine DSM300 and one marked SeaTalkHS. I'm assuming the DMS300 probably provides the fishfinder screen I see on the E80. And the SeaTalkHS box must be the NMEA-type network.

I'd like to have my laptop at the nav station as a backup and route planner (I know there is a fugawi/raymarine software product for route planning, but my product is good for both planning and sailing). I'd like to as a minimum get AIS and GPS from the SeaTalk to my PC. I need my PC anyway to talk to my SSB radio, do weather downloads, email via radio, etc. So I'd like to have all that at the nav station and leave the main chart plotter at the binnacle.

So what to buy? Of course if there were a Raymarine cable I'd buy it but I can't find one. So I see some devices that connect SeaTalk to PC, notably the SeaTalkLink here http://gadgetpool.de/home/english/index.html . It appears that my SeaTalkHS box has some connections available, I assume it's not ethernet but proprietary NMEA connections. Would the gadgetpool device just plug in?

Some other cables are sold, but with no connectors on them, notably the Digital Yacht SeaTalk1 to NMEA https://www.hodgesmarine.com/Digital-Yac...digstn.htm . This device implies it connects PC to SeaTalk but do I need a connector or can I just wire in the 3 wires to my SeaTalk HS box?

Will either of these allow me to get GPS and AIS on my computer? IS there something else I should look at? Are there different flavors of SeaTalk? I see SeaTalk HS and SeaTalk 1 and some others and am not sure of the differences.

Is there something I can read to get up to speed on this? (Besides becoming an electrical engineer which at 60 I'm just not up for).

Thanks for any help you can give this newbie moving into 1990s technology!