Marina owner showed up today with 4 boxes of misc parts I have been waiting for.
Early Christmas.....

One of the items I ordered was a 2" diameter "hockey puck" USB GPS receiver by GlobalSat Bu353s4. Available online for about $35. Wanted a backup until I can hardwire my ancient Garmin nmea output into a usb port.

It shipped with a mini-disk which will not fit in my laptop, and the manual was all geared towards Windows... Downloaded the linux driver from GlobalSat but before I installed them I cruised around the GlobalSat forum looking for info about using with linux. Found one post stating that the Bu353s4 (and most other of their products) are already supported by later linux kernels. What the heck, just plug it in and see what happens.

What happened was in about 15 sec, OpenCpn, PolarView, GPS panel, and GPS satellites all recognized the receiver and were outputting data.

No fuss, no muss, no configuration, nuthin'. Happy surprise. Small, IPV6 waterproof, cheap and it works.

It's the gpsd...works 99.44% of the time with no muss, no fuss.

Gotta love it... Looking forward to hooking up the Garmin and AIS next week. Bet I can break something.

Did you do the VHF discriminator conversion? I remember flipping it on for the first time. It was awesome.

I struggled with gnuais trying to get the input to talk to the soundcard so it could pass it on to OpenCPN and I could have my curiosity satisfied.

I almost made a plaque "Abandon All Hope Here" and then I found Navigatrix. It was like finding a beauty queen with brains. I plugged it in; aside from turning somethings 'on' I didn't have to touch a thing...out of the box.

However, I didn't have the sense to leave it alone; but that's when the fun starts...usually.

Hi, has anyone done the discriminator conversion and used it in Navigatrix? I have a properly converted VHF from www.discriminator.nl ready programmed for the two AIS channels and Rene there is helpful in supplying a driver when it comes to Windows but he hasn't tried it on Navigatrix.

How does one connect it? Perhaps mine is working 'out of the box' but I have no way to tell as I have no AIS signals where I live just now miles from anything. But I'd like to have all up and running for when I can get to the sea (when the ice up here melts) and get straight on the water.

Can someone please help me and tell me what I need to do, if anything... what settings do I need to adjust on OpenCPN? Do I need to enter any command lines? Do I need a driver or to install extra packages in NavigatrixLinux in any way?

Thanks for any help Jules

The nice thing is, Jules...you just plug it in to the audio Line-In of your computer/sound card.

Channel 87/88 on the VHF.

Default settings work. OpenCPN AIS toggle to display/hide.