[Xastir] Might the Garmin Astro system and Rino HCx units work with Xastir?

[Curt, WE7U]

On Fri, 7 Sep 2007, Jim Tolbert wrote:

> Does anyone have opinions as to whether the Garmin Astro unit might work
> with Xastir?   What questions could I ask Garmin Tech Support that would
> confirm or deny this?

If the Astro setup is anything like the RINO's, then the only way
for Xastir to get anything from the system is to query the GPS side
of things regularly to get the waypoint information.  That's how we
do it with the RINO's.

There was some talk a while back on another forum about trying to
reverse-engineer the on-the-air protocol used by the RINO's, but I
don't know if anyone ever pursued that to completion.  Garmin, like
most other commercial manufacturers, wishes to protect their
intellectual property and not publish such things.  It'd be really
cool though if using a scanner and a soundcard one could decode the
little buggers.

--
Curt, WE7U: <www.eskimo.com/~archer/>     XASTIR: <www.xastir.org>
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