Rudder Position on a Garmin NMEA200 MFD?

[Rockport]

Hi!
I have a late 80's Nova 44 Tawainese twin diesel CPMY equipped with just installed Garmin 12" Chartplotters/MFD's & new garmin radar. The boat also has an original equipment Robertson Autohelm. There is an upper skybridge and lower full helm stations with hydraulic steering.

I want to get visibility to my rudder position on my Garmin instrumentation displays, even when the Robertson isn't powered up (Robertson control is only in the lower helm, anyway).

Can anyone share suggestions on the best way to accomplish this? From my research, it seems most rudder sensor are analog and almost any one might do (but I'm open to suggestions). Then I'd need to get an analog to NMEA200 converter (Garmin GRA-10?). There seems to be some advantage to staying within the Garmin family for interconnectivity?)

Can anyone lend some ideas on a decent rudder sensor unit and how to get it into the Garmin NMEA2000 network?

Thanks in advance!

 

[twistedtree]

Your Robertson AP probably has a rudder position sensor, and can send out a standard rudder position message for other devices to use. As an older AP, it will probably NMEA 0183, but that’s fine assuming the Garmin has an available 0183 input. If you check the Robertson manuals it should tell you which 0183 sentences it sends. There may also be a configuration setting to tell it to send that message. The down side is that the AP will have to be powered on for it to work.