does this piece of code look ok?

[Richardco]

Hi NavMicroSystems

you said:-
A standard NMEA Talker sends out 1-3 sentences per second
(depending on the type of talker and length of the sentence)
The standard baudrate is 4800

if that is in a thread somwhere else i must have missed it because i was under the impresion that the data stream from a talker was continuous at 4800 baud, Again my mistake, but there has been a lot said about it,

I can see why for a sailracer nipping along at 30 knots or more why realtime would have to be the case, for trim and distance travlled and i can now see how all the data from 4 talkers would be collected, and sent out at 4800baud.

I have an 18ft hastings rye clinker with a single pot 10hp Diesel yanmar and if it goes faster than 5 knots without thrashing the engine it must have a tail wind and be running with the tide.

My equipment consists of a garmin gps 120 and a simrad EQ30 echosounder i have used the nmea output from the garmin and sent the data to the EQ30 as the display on the garmin is small and the backlight is poor, the EQ30 on the other have is Large and bright, with the vision problems sorted i discover that the EQ30 has the ability to display information from several different nmea devices however there is only one nmea input so you must just choose one external device or go down this route of buying or building some sort of multiplexor, at the moment i could probably make do with just 2 inputs to the EQ30, the garmin and a weather instrument to give wind speed and direction, which can be done on just one pic with two hardware usarts with no problems so i understand, so i came on here and looked at the threads on 'NMEA' and from what i read i saw that maybe in the future i would need more than two nmea devices connected to the system and so decided to go down that track for my boat system but to try and keep it on one chip if i could and if this meant losing data then that didnt seem to bad. Your last post above answers all my questions i do thankyou very much for that, with all that you have said maybe i will just keep to two nmea inputs to hardware usarts on one chip, that will take into consideration all the knowlege you have emparted to me and allow me to keep it all on one chip as well Assuming that the pic will be fast enough to collect all information from the two inputs Thanks again. with all that in mind i think a re-write of my code would be in order lol
Now all i have to do is remember where i saw the post on two hardware usarts on one pic (i hpoe it wasnt an atmel) so i can see what pic they were refering to.