maby
Well-Known Member
NMEA0183 started out as a simple serial protocol to transmit GPS positioning data and simple scalar readings from things like speed and depth sensors to display heads. The message formats for those functions were pretty well defined by the standards body and compatibility was good between manufacturers. Then the various manufacturers started to add their own extensions in order to support additional functionality that would differentiate their products from the competition and compatibility suffered. NMEA2000 was developed as the next generation - solving most of the problems associated with hanging multiple devices off an NMEA0183 connection and bringing the data rate up a lot. The standatrds body also moved some of the more popular bespoke extensions of 0183 into the NMEA2000 standard, but there is still an enormous scope for manufacturers to make non-standard additions - more really than there was in NMEA0183 because of the increased data rate and multi-device network capabilities of NMEA2000.
Unless you really just want a single instrument head showing a couple of variables like speed and depth from a single sensor, NMEA2000 is definitely the way to go. It is designed for multi-head, multi-sensor systems and, provided you obey a small set of electrical rules, you can simply plug devices up to the NMEA2000 network - most of them will cooperate and work together and the few cases of incompatibility will very rarely stop other things working.
Unless you really just want a single instrument head showing a couple of variables like speed and depth from a single sensor, NMEA2000 is definitely the way to go. It is designed for multi-head, multi-sensor systems and, provided you obey a small set of electrical rules, you can simply plug devices up to the NMEA2000 network - most of them will cooperate and work together and the few cases of incompatibility will very rarely stop other things working.