I have just left the audible alarms turned off so far. Sailing in-shore, someone is always on a "collision course" as they follow turns in the channel. It IS very handy to know that an oil tanker is flying down the channel, out of sight around the next bend in the river. The RAM mic in the cockpit is surprisingly adequate for that. I suppose that I should set a five-mile proximity alarm (if that is one of the options.) I am embarrassed to say that all the electronics that I loaded on board a couple of years ago have too many alarms. It takes me quite a while to figure out which thing is beeping and what it means. For example, the autopilot "off-course" alarm sounds exactly like the CO alarm. And since I previously was having trouble with the exhaust system... I'm looking in all the wrong places :rolleyes_d: )
I send the output from the AIS to a laptop chart plotter on the chart table. As long as the companionway is open, I can see that well enough from the helm position, although I have to go below to read details. Of course, the screen always blinks into sleep mode exactly when you are worried about colliding with something. (Yes I know, but there are more different "never sleep" settings than I always remember to turn on.) Oddly enough, names of vessels and destinations rarely show up on the Standard Horizon screen (MMSI, course, speed, location do show up, usually) but they do show up on the chart plotter.
And you can't depend on it too much. I still encounter commercial vessels with no AIS signal at all. And the occasional AIS signal (phantom?) that shows up on the screen but returns no information.
Re: inputting data to an older Furuno unit. This seems a little dicey but it might be possible. I have an older Furuno, and it seems to have some mix of a proprietary bus and 0183 I/O. I thought it was going to output radar target data to the chart plotter, but it only outputs the distance and bearing to one target, which you define by manually spotting the cross-hairs over it. Not very handy. Hopefully newer units play a bit more nicely with other toys.