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vshtonov

Dear Raymarine customers,

I succeeded in interfacing the Classic E80 to a tablet via a wireless connection and I am very happy with the results. Here is a summary what you need to do if you want to replicate my setup:

1. Get a Windows touch tablet of your choice. All work, including Windows 10, 8.1 or 7. Focus on the quality of the display. One good choice is a Windows 7 industrial tablet ($99 on Amazon) or as in my case a Windows 10 tablet for $59.

2. Install Raytech RNS v6.1 on the tablet. You need a license key. I recommend that you purchase one from Raymarine. If you have a working license key, you can install it on 100 devices if you desire to do so. Enough said on this topic.

3. Get a wireless router. Most will work but you want to select a model where you can configure the routing tables manually. The E80 has a fixed IP address (shown in the menu's) - for example, mine was 10.0.59.173. Once it is booted, it starts checking the network starting with 10.0.0.1 upwards. Thus, you want to configure the router with a gateway of 10.0.0.1 and the tablet that connects over Wifi as 10.0.0.2 or above. Raymarine recommends 10.0.0.7, you can use any address in that subnet. Make sure it does not conflict with any other devices you have. Then you setup a fixed route between the E80 (10.0.59.173 in my case) and the tablet (10.0.0.2 in my case). First you power on the router, then start the Raytech RNS sofware on the tablet, then cycle the power on the E80. The E80 will investigate the network and find the RNS software. You do not need to use the Raymarine network utilities as you have set fixed addresses already.

4. Once you start the Raytech RNS software on the tablet you may experience some initial lockups. In most cases, this is due to the graphics driver issues. My approach was to disable all accelerations in the software (Settings menu) then enable them one by one to see which ones work with my graphics card. I am running the software in Windows 10 mode, i.e. do not worry about any compatibility once you have the graphics settings figured out. Also, 32bit vs. 64bit OS makes no difference. The only issue you need to worry about is display rotation. The program crashes everytime when you change from landscape to portrait mode but this is typical of many older apps. My suggestion is to decide which orientation you prefer then lock the display rotation on the tablet. Portrait works great for radar, landscape gives you two nice side by side, nearly square displays.

5. The Raytech RNS has many customization options which is great. I suggest you play with the colour settings (the original colors for the radar display are really bad) to make the radar picture appear to your liking or just to match the E80 colors), then increase the font size in Windows (to make it easier to touch with wet fingers), set up you gribs (you need to download them separately and put them in the right directory) and you are all set.

6. Overall impression. The key benefit of the Raytech RNS running on the tablet is that you can show radar anywhere on the boat. Other benefits that you will get to like over time include very fast operation. You can do weather routing, boat polars, racing optimizations... lots of good stuff. The touch is great. For example, you do not pinch and zoom but point and click which works better with wet fingers or with one handed operation. Also, you can actually run multiple displays off the wireless switch if you wanted to do this. The E80 gets thoroughly confused at times if it gets instructions from two RNS instances at the same time but it was fun to test.

S/V Pizzazz