Garmin Etrex Nmea link

[neb]

Trying to hook my Cobra VHF (DSC) with a Garmin Etrex GPS , does anyone know where to buy a NMEA out cable to suit?

Has anyone done this?

[118118]

hi,

i have recently looked into this aswell, as far as i looked you cannot buy a cable with just a plug and wire. the origional garmin cables are very expensive, so not ideal to cut up.

on ebay there are people who sell compatable cables alot cheeper. these can double up as power leads as they have the car cigggarette plug end on. there is also a serial socket for serial pc connection which i removed to get access to the data wires.


i have yet to connect to my icom m505, so cant tell you wether its actually possible, but i believe it is in thoery!

good luck

[ben5883]

just identify the nmea cables from both units put together via a buzz bar and make sure negatives go to the same earth rail

[neb]

Came across this:

http://www.jens-seiler.de/etrex/datacable.html

Still not sure about the Cobra connections though.

[MikeCC]

Well the patch cable looks OK for a bit of waypoint downloading from your laptop but I wouldn't want one to transmit my position for DSC in a tricky situation!

List prices for the eTrex cables are £15.99 for data only (bare wires - what you need) and £34.99 for the combined one with cigarette lighter adaptor and 9-pin plug. If you use that one, I'd suggest leaving the plug on and getting a cheap serial cable that you can connect and cut to get the bare wires. That way you can still easily connect to a PC with either a serial port or using a USB converter.

The only wires you need to identify from the Cobra are NMEA in (could be brown or blue) and signal ground and connect these to NMEA out and ground from the GPS.

[neb]

Thanks for that, where do I buy the cables from you mention?