I know I should put this in a notebook. Or on my phone. Or… I don’t know. I’m putting it here.
Garmin and Aqua Maps GPS data
Garmin was one of the things I wanted in a boat. The down side to Garmin is they don’t play nice with others. A perfect example is that Aqua Maps, which has the USACE data, doesn’t talk to Garmin and Garmin doesn’t talk to it. I love Aqua Maps mapping and use it almost exclusively when in shallow US waters. However my iPad, when sitting in the pilot house, doesn’t have decent GPS signal. No problem, Garmin, with at least 4 GPS’, probably more, has all the GPS data I need. Plus it has a NMEA 2000 backbone. Easy!
Remember when I said Garmin didn’t play well with others? They won’t share the GPS data via Wifi. Enter Actisense, W2K-1, a small device that reads the NMEA data and transmits it on its own Wifi, or even better, connects to my existing Starlink Wifi. I installed the device on my Pilothouse NMEA backbone behind the helm, powered everything back up, and Viola! I had a new Wifi. I typed in the ip address which is printed on the device, and I had a simple Web interface. I then switched it to client mode, which of course changed the IP address. No worries, I switched to my Starlink app on my phone and found the W2K device and saw its new IP address. I entered the username and password which are both admin, and boom, I’m connected again.
Then I went to Aqua Maps, added a new connection, and entered the port and protocol from the data server setting in the web portal for the Actisense. I started the connection in Aqua Maps and 2 seconds later a pop up popped saying, “An external GPS is providing location to your ipad.” The whole thing took about 15 minutes. Now my iPad can sit anywhere on the boat and I will have GPS data straight from the Garmins, accurate and updated real time.
The only issue I have is if Starlink rolls the IP address via DHCP, I will have to reconnect from scratch. Hence my desire to document the process here.