Thanks for the advice. I share your concern about overloading the buffer on the baud converter, but since I am only sending
GPS sentences once a second (not a whole bunch of multiplexed stuff) and these sentences are typically sent at 4800 baud via "standard NMEA", I am hopeful that I will have no overflow issues. The reason I'm sending it at 38400 is not because of increased bandwidth - it's because the system is simplified if I send it at the same baud rate that I receive the AIS data (only need one Bluetooth dongle and the
radio multiplexes DSC and AIS onto the same port).
I agree that the E85001 is fragile. The "defect" that I referred to above was a smell of burning phenolics after I had it in use for about 5 min. I pulled it apart and saw a black spot on the bottom of the PC card (although it continued to work OK). After multiple calls to various tech support people I was assured that it was a component failure, not something that I caused. But it scared me enough that I decided to design it out of my system. Right now the only benefit it was giving me was putting depth into the chart plotter program, and I'd need to add a multiplexer to make that work anyway, which is just more cost than I want to bear right now.
FYI, the 18xLVC and Bluetooth converter came in yesterday. Although the
radio is not in yet, I was able to connect the 18x to the Bluetooth converter, and get
GPS fixes into OpenCPN wirelessly. I had previously tested the baud converter, so it looks like all the components are going to work. I just need to wait for the
radio before I can hook them up the way I want them.