Checking AIS Receiver Serial Connection using Hyperterminal
Once you have a device connected to a serial port, you can use the Hyperterminal program provided with windows to check it is communicating properly. So if we have connected an AIS receiver to the serial port of a computer we can indeed use that to check it is working.
This is really the first thing you want to do before starting to setup shipplotter.
So we would connect our AIS receiver to the serial port of the computer and then in XP we would choose START / Programs / Accessories / Communications / Hyperterminal
So we have to give a name for our connection.
Give it whatever name, it does not matter. Click OK.
Then you will need to choose the COM port the AIS Receiver is connected to. Most likely it will be COM1 or COM2 unless you are using a USB to serial converter it might be different there. If you fail to connect or get no data then you know its the wrong one and you can go back and start again and select another one and try that.
Then we want to set the properties of the connection. There is only one to change at default settings.
Change the top one Bits per second to 38400. It is very likely your receiver will be transmitting serial data at that speed. You can check in the manual if there is any problem. Then click OK.
Now we should have a connection to the receiver and we will be getting the NMEA data in !AIVDM sentences. This is basically the raw AIS data that we will use shipplotter to decode. Anyway, so after following this tutorial we now know the receiver is transmitting data ok via the serial connection and we know the serial port it is connected to and the Bits per second setting.
