Best navigation setup?

[thebastidge]

Spent most of last weekend actually installing the same Garmin NMEA 2k GPS unit I referenced above, in our motor vessel (Carver 350 Mariner) as a trial run that I'll get to repeat on the sail boat soon. Running wires & cables in a boat is SUCH fun. Get some good stretching in before attempting to do this. Have some ibuprofen on hand for the next morning; you WILL be sore. Your knuckles will probably look like you've been fighting kittens.

Two (strong) recommendations:

Get a steel "fish tape", available at numerous hardware stores, Home Depot/Lowes, or online:https://www.amazon.com/Klein-Tools-5600 ... 0026TBOU8/
Get a cheap fiber optic endoscope camera: https://www.amazon.com/DEPSTECH-Waterpr ... B01MYTHWK4

There are other brands and sellers; I'm not recommending any one of these in particular. The longer the fiber cable, the more expensive and probably useful it will be, up to a point.

It took literally hours to run a couple cables through the arch, the gunwhales, up through to the cockpit, and remove the old one. Which I ended up cutting so I can't even Craigslist the old GPS antenna to recoup a few bucks. I actually have the endoscope camera, and I didn't think to use it until AFTER I had stuck the old analog GPS antenna's cable. It jammed into the corner of the arch where the cable had a compression-fit connector, to extend length. The brass compression fitting was long enough to stick in the internal curve of the radar arch, and had I used the camera I probably could have finessed it past with the fish tape, but I ended up just cutting it and discarding the whole unit. That probably cost me $25-$40 in cost I could have recouped on Craigslist. (I'm a cheap bastidge).

I am also playing with the iKommunicate Gateway. https://ikommunicate.com/.

I have this on my workbench at home. When I got the NMEA GPS recevier and the Garmin heading sensor, I was able to connect them all on the bench with a 12vdc bench test power supply and read values on laptop, more or less without configuring much of anything. Now I need to figure out how to create a page for displaying engine data- I have the Mercruiser Smartcraft to NMEA 2000 gateway plugged to the engines' EFI modules, now I need to run about 30' of NMEA backbone cable to connect up with the rest of my NMEA network on the Carver. Since I have so many more and more complex systems to monitor on the Carver (GPS, depth/water speed/water temp, and VHF/AIS are about all I have on the sailboat, but the motor vessel has dual engines and lots of systems), I am not sure the value will be there to purchase another iKommunicate gateway to install on the sail boat.