Woody, yes. I answered some of this on another recent thread, but not specifically the Garmin. So, you first need to convert one of your USB ports to serial with an adapter,-USB to RS232 DB9-. Simple and cheap little adap that should come with a driver disk. Then..
The NEMA output wires on a Garmin, (to the best of my memory, but this should be it), but the blue wire is NEMA in to pin 2, brown is NEMA out to pin 3, and the black,(ground/shield), goes to pin 5. At that point the computer should recognize the plotter.
I did this one time just too see if I could do it, and it did work. It turned out to not meet what I was looking for in the end game, but it does work. I ended up with a gps dongle myself, and it came from laptopnav. A sucky little 'program' that had a bunch of stuff for sure on the CD, and required some semi technical knowhow to make it all work. With the CD and the dongle I guess it was worth the hundred bucks. My M.O. is to throw money at problems to save myself the aggravation, so the sarcastic answer was above. I got my moneys worth. Sometimes I still do wish the laptop was talking with the plotter, but it's not a big deal.
(Oh yeah Woody, I still have not plotted any stops on the way up from Miami, you know sailboats, a lot will depend on the weather and a hundred other things. I'm not going to get beat up doing it, so I might come in now and then).
