Thanks for your comments. I have now added a configuration setting so the user can choose what NMEA serial baud rate to use. This will be included in the next release. I'll also look into providing AIS data.
The NMEA over TCP/IP should work well, and I know of at least one person using this successfully to interface with hardware displays. (It's marked as experimental as I don't use a chart plotter that can receive NMEA data by TCP/IP, so can't test it fully myself).