If you want to roll your own, given your lack of experience and equipment, I'd recommend an arduino with a serial shield. The total hardware should cost less than $30 delivered. The footprint will be roughly the size of a pack of cigarettes. You'll just need a computer and USB port to program it. Tutorials are all over the web. Education and recreation right?

One serial port is all you need, just read the output from the Dynon, parse the sentence, modify the sentence, or pass it straight through. You'll have to re-calculate the checksum on the modified sentences.

If you need help on the checksum, send me a PM, I can probably dig up some code. If I remember correctly, it wasn't documented very well.

Paige

Going to try and tackle it soon
 

Paige,

Thanks. I have an Ardunio around here somewhere. My son is pretty good at this type of programming, so I will get his help and see what we can do. If I need anymore help, I will ask.

Thanks.

Brian