I wanted to use the Raymarine C120 as the primary means of electronic chartplotting while on board – it is interfaced to all the instruments as well as the the DSC radio, radar, and AIS.
But while onshore, at home, at anchor or in a marina it is often more convenient to use a laptop. It is now so easy to download grib files, look up weather forecasts, email, browse the web, and forums and so on.
I thought I would use the laptop for two main additional purposes.
a) Chartplotting using the software I already had before installing the Raymarine kit on board ie. Garmin’s Map source software which uses the Bluechart charts – all proprietory to Garmin.
b) Interface to the Target SSB radio so that I could get Navtex, RTTY and Weatherfax transmissions and store them on the laptop for reference while on passage.
c) Transfer data to / from the laptop / C120 and the RC400 using a 1Gb Sandisk Compact Flash Card
I have been able to achieve all of this but I must admit that using the SSB is a lot more tricky than I anticipated. The picture here shows the audio cable from the SSB radio into the MIC input of the laptop….
The laptop is an ACER Aspire 5020WLMi and is – in hindsight – probably way over specified now that I have experience of using it in action..it has a built in card reader (very useful) 1Gb of RAM and a 100Gb HDD – but at least it will cope with advances in nav software which like all PC software is destined to bloat and bloat..
October 26th, 2006|
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This is the SSB that I installed it is the 
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would:
As it turned out all the above criteria were satisfied except (d). The unit can xmit/rcv NMEA but I have not been able to use that facility since the C120 has only one NMEA port and that is set to 38,400bd so it can receive the AIS data – which only comes at that speed.
Many of the forums note that only the 64Mb sandisk card will work – how did you get to use a 1Gb disk ! ?
Yes I have seen those comments too – but by the time I discovered them I had already bought the IGb card – anyway it turns out the card worked – so I dont know what these negative comments were about – I did not even have to format the card – I just put it in and used it. I even used it on the C120 to do the software upgrade so that the display would show AIS data.