J/30 Class Association Forums J/30 Forum The Boat, Sails and Equipment How to Make PC control navigation with Tacktick

It's possible. Look at the [url=http://j30.us/files/Rhapsody/Rhapsody_Schematics.pdf[/url] and note the bottom center of the 1st page that ties certain handshake signal pins on the RS-232 9 pin connector. I tested my setup and had the PC using Offshore Navigator drive the autohelm. Make sure that you don't have two devices sending tracks at the same time. You should setup the devices (e.g. GPS, PC) to minimize just the NMEA sentences you need. I turned off all the Garmin proprietary stuff on my GPSMAP 276c.

I also found out that the TackTick NMEA interface sometimes doesn't reliably drive 3 loads. Remember to set your PC serial interface for 4800 baud, 8 data bits, no party and 1 stop bit.