It’s Alive!

Turns out that when you’re trying to get your Standard Horizon HX870 Handheld to emit NMEA sentences, you need to go into the Setting Menu and enable all the message types ‘by hand’ before the device can push data to programs that are listening to it.

I’d managed to get OpenCPN to recognize the radio, but it was oddly silent.

But no longer… the First Light Pi has seen its own First Light from the GPS inside the radio.

I also ordered an external GPS antenna for it, but it’s nice to know that I’ll have a backup to the backup to frontline electronics.

Here you can see the feed as it was during testing.