Is NMEA 2000 going anywhere??

[wipe_out]

Hi,

Kinda new to boating and all the marine electronics and since our boat has none I have been looking into it quite a bit.. Something I have noticed is that there seems to be a LOT of support for NMEA 0183 but surprisingly little for NMEA 2000.. The only manufacturer that seems to have really embraced NMEA 2000 appears to be Garmin.. Now it maybe because NMEA 2000 is a newer system but it has been around since at least 2009 so its not that new and I would have expected far more support for it by now IF it was being adopted by manufacturers..

So is NMEA 2000 going anywhere?

Is it worth worrying about in terms of choosing new electronic equipment or is everyone going to stick with NMEA 0183 for the foreseeable future?

 

[nigelmercier]

NMEA 0183 is a robust system and perfectly adequate for the majority of gear.

 

[Cardo]

Whilst Raymarine do their own thing with SeaTalkNG, it is easily interoperable with NMEA2000. Just need to use the STng - NMEA2000 patch cables. Most of the Raymarine plotters/instruments etc also talk/understand NMEA2000.

 

[prv]

I think NMEA 2000 makes sense for fitting out from scratch at the upper end of the budget range, with lots of kit that all needs to talk to each other. It's heartily embraced in the mobo world in particular, as modern engines speak NMEA 2000 so you can see revs, fuel consumption, warnings etc on your helm instruments.

For smaller yachts that just need to connect a VHF to a GPS or an AIS receiver to a plotter, and replace gear piecemeal rather than installing a whole integrated system at once, the lingua franca of NMEA 0183 has proved more practical.

Pete

 

[FullCircle]

I now have a mix of both.

Raymarine SeaTalkNG for Chartplotter/Radar and Autopilot. 2000ish

B&G Triton (effectively Simnet) instruments 2000ish

Airmar transducers 2000

Navman 3100 0183 Repeater

Comar AIS 0183

S/H DSC VHF 0183

Must be a better way of making up the cables to proper length though.

 

[wipe_out]

Thanks.. I am certainly not looking in the high end or putting a full system together.. Just didn't want to end up on a position where I am stuck as I try and expand the system.. It sounds like it's not really that important a feature to have since everything can be made to work together if needed..

 

[David2452]

Must be a better way of making up the cables to proper length though.

There is, field attachable connectors and bulk cable, N2K has been around for a long time now, when I first joined NMEA it was being developed along with early adoptors like Lowrance, (Lowrancenet) the septics absolutely love it as do I, it gives so much more scope for complex systems intigration, including Victron power management, Webasto are adopting it, tankage, engine monitoring, pump management etc. Probably less of an advantage on minimally equipped yachts but still simpler to use if doing a refit.

 

[westernman]

NMEA 2000 is CAN + (a cabling standard specific for boats) which was designed for cars and trucks. It is widely used for both cars and trucks and in quite a few other applications.
I designed the first 8 chips with CAN in them for Intel, Bosch, Philips, Motorola, National, Siemens.

 

[David2452]

Not really, though Controlled area Network it is not compatible with J1939 used in vehicles and needs an interface to talk and recieve, the physicality is a direct lift from the factory process control system "Devicenet" including cabling, plugs and termination.

 

[laika]

I agree with what others have said. N2K *is* widely implemented now, except manufacturers have "extended" it (though usually maintained backwards though not forwards compatibility) and called it different things. Simrad have simnet, raymarine have seatalkNG (as cardo said).

Per prv's comment, if you're fitting out with a whole new suite of instruments you'll want to go N2K if you want to network them all together and connect them to your plotter. The alternative is stressing about topologies and possibly splashing out for a multiplexor. One network which everything attaches to with all data available everywhere is a splendid idea.

Except N2K doesn't *completely* do that. To anyone except an electronic engineer with a tank top it looked like decade+ old technology when it was released. You'll need a separate (probably ethernet) connection for anything with a high data rate like radar, sonar, thermal imaging cameras and MFD-MFD repeater connections. Want to link up your i-thing and other gadgets? You'll need to convert it to IP, and for a lot of i-thing apps, nmea-0183 over IP. And lots of VHFs still don't support N2K (ICOMs don't).

So why doesn't everything just connect up via IP (like the rest of the world)? There's a standard for NMEA over (IP over) ethernet, IEC 61162 part 4. Except none of the big manufacturers bothered with it and the i-thing app developers who're driving NMEA-over-wifi understandably don't want to pay money for a closed standard when they can just use a simple "de facto" (non-) standard. The NMEA are scheduled to release a new spec for data transmission over (IP over) ethernet next year: NMEA onenet. Does that mean N2K is not going anywhere? Not according to the NMEA, who say you'll need n2k as well as onenet for some things (reliable/real time data transmission): Not an issue for leisure boaters, and for reasons I could expand on, pretty bogus anyway. I cynically suspect this will be another protocol based on decade+ old technology. At least it's a decade on from N2K.

How long will onenet take to adopt? Who knows: hasn't been released yet, but I suspect rather less time than N2K took to gain acceptance as there are customer-obvious reasons for adoption (connections to everything else in the world). I wouldn't be waiting for it if I needed new kit now, but as I reckon my seatalk 1 stuff is good for another 5 years, I'll probably be *trying* to skip N2k.

(Apologies for opinionated/speculative content)

 

[grumpy_o_g]

Short answer to your question is "yes, but not as fast as everyone wants it to". The main differences between NMEA 0183 and NMEA 2000 are firstly that NMEA 2000 is a full blown networking system. This means that, providing the electronics manufacturers allow it, you much have much greater flexibility in what you attach to your network, how many of them, etc. Second thing is it's much faster - dial-up compared to broadband almost - which is especially important for some things such as yaw, itch and roll info to radar system or an autopilot. The last thing and most important is that NMEA 0183 won't change much more whereas there's a lot of development and work being done around NMEA 2000. NMEA0183 can talk with NMEA 2000 - but it isn't always straight-forward (nothing to do with connecting electronics devices ever is, no matter what anyone claims) - it can definitely be done and often without too much cost or problem.

Quick bit of history re NMEA 2000 - NMEA is not "open source". It's a proprietary protocol that you have to buy if you want the full specification. The organisation has a huge list of members comprising all the serious and some not so serious players in the marine electronics industry. Nearly all the members knew pretty much wanted they wanted in NMEA 2000 years ago - effectively take Bosch's CAN system developed for the car industry and use it for boats, adding detailed marinised hardware specs for connections etc. Trying to get that bunch of companies to agree to everything in detail was like getting a unanimous agreement out of the UN though - it took ages. As a result a few companies got fed up and did exactly WiFi router manufacturers do all the time which is second guess what the final specification would be. For some time it was effectively impossible for anyone to call their device "NMEA 2000 certified" because the NMEA hadn't agreed on and published the final specification - enough was known to make a pretty good guess though and most of those early devices work pretty well with NMEA 2000 certified products today.

There's a powerpoint presentation from NMEA here http://www.nmea.org/Assets/nmea%202000%20mets%202011%20presentation.pdf - much of it is corporate BS but there's a few good slides that show the difference between the two standards. Just to expand on the point about NMEA 200 developing - the bit of NMEA that is really relevant to us is the sentence or PGN. This is the name NMEA uses to describe the data it sends around the network - so there's a sentence for heading, a sentence for water temperature, etc. - in other words the types of data or things you want need to know or that your systems need to use in calculations. There's a lot more sentences for NMEA 2000 than there are for 0183 and more are being written all the time. At the moment they've almost got AIS MOB devices cracked and they're working on WiFi I believe. Add in the ability to interface to the CANbus on an engine (so you can display all sorts of data from your engine on your MFD) and I would really want NMEA 2000 certified displays at the very least and, unless there's a big cost factor or something, I can't think why you wouldn't go completely NMEA 2000.

Happy to have any of that constructively criticised or corrected by those in the know...


Edit: Forgot to mention www.panbo.com - an excellent blog covering the marine electronics industry . This is a write up from the 2012 METS show http://www.panbo.com/archives/2012/11/mets_2012_show_report_part_2_nmea_2000_related.html (I hope I'm allowed to post the link...)

 

[Norman_E]

Someone described NMEA2000 to me a few days ago, as a 20 year old system that is slowly replacing a 30 year old one!

Despite that I am very impressed by the ease with which different makes of kit work together, and above all the ease of cabling. I have just put in B&G Tritons, plus a Garmin GMI 10 and an Actisense Gateway to connect my old VDO wind instrument NMEA0183 output into the system. All very easy.

By contrast I have a Standard Horizon GX1500E DSC VHF and an Advansea plotter which need connecting via NMEA0183 for DSC polling. Their manuals don't even speak the same language as far as NMEA0183 is concerned and I am still trying to work out how to connect them. One uses terminology of Input + and - and Output + and -, and the other NMEA1 & 2, in and out. Not at all helped by the Advansea digital manual having its connection diagrams at such low resolution that they cannot be read.

In my opinion NMEA2000 is a huge advance, and the instruments that use it have multifunction capabilities far advanced from older systems, for example the Garmin GMI 10 will display a barometer or a barograph when connected to its wind sensor, and either a full 360 degree wind direction display or a close hauled indicator, among many other options.

EDIT: For the first time with the boat on the hard I have wind from astern, I turned on the system and the GMI 10 displays a running indicator instead of the close hauled one, brilliant!

 

[maby]

Most fundamentally, NMEA0183 is a point-to-point system - it works fine between two devices but becomes increasingly cumbersome with each new device added. NMEA0183 based plotters had two or three NMEA ports on the back and possibly a limited capability to gateway messages between them, but that was about as far as it went. It was fine if you had a single plotter, basic instruments and possibly a DSC radio needing a position feed. These days, even quite small boats are being fitted with multiple plotters, AIS, multiple displays, radar and fishfinders and 0183 is just not up to it. NMEA2000 allows you to rapidly connect a large number of devices, all interacting freely. Even NMEA2000 is not enough for the latest set of requirements - radar, fishfinders and video. Our new boat has both an NMEA2000 network installed and an ethernet network in parallel for the highest bandwidth requirements.

 

[Mrnotming]

A very useful discussion,my thanks to all who have helped me survive the next 100 years of networked instruments!
hopefully Wi-Fi will be the choice for the raggies,though even we might benefit from knowing how happy our engine is on a display.

very interesting and a good example of the combined knowledge resource we enjoy on here!

 

[charles_reed]

Hi,

Kinda new to boating and all the marine electronics and since our boat has none I have been looking into it quite a bit.. Something I have noticed is that there seems to be a LOT of support for NMEA 0183 but surprisingly little for NMEA 2000.. The only manufacturer that seems to have really embraced NMEA 2000 appears to be Garmin.. Now it maybe because NMEA 2000 is a newer system but it has been around since at least 2009 so its not that new and I would have expected far more support for it by now IF it was being adopted by manufacturers..

So is NMEA 2000 going anywhere?

Is it worth worrying about in terms of choosing new electronic equipment or is everyone going to stick with NMEA 0183 for the foreseeable future?

Inertia by most manufacturers. Lowrance were early adopters and it's definitely a simpler way of producing an integrated system.
I'd agree it's not worth changing from 0183 to 2000, for the sake of change, but, if you're doing a refit or starting from scratch, far more sensible to do it with NMEA 2000 than 0183

 

[Norman_E]

Inertia by most manufacturers. Lowrance were early adopters and it's definitely a simpler way of producing an integrated system.
I'd agree it's not worth changing from 0183 to 2000, for the sake of change, but, if you're doing a refit or starting from scratch, far more sensible to do it with NMEA 2000 than 0183

My feelings entirely. When the LCD screens of the old VDO instruments began to fail I quickly decided that NMEA2000 was the way to go. In fact the OLD VDO Logic system was ahead of its time as its Logic Bus was CAN based, just like NMEA2000.

 

[maby]

It is also worth pointing out that NMEA2000 has already effectively won. All major manufacturers now use NMEA2000 as their primary interconnect though the water is muddied somewhat by Raymarine and Simrad who chose to use a non-standard plug and give it their own names. If you are prepared to buy, or make up your own, adaptor cables, you can already interconnect all the products of Raymarine, Simrad, Lowrance, B&G and Garmin on a single network and, with very few exceptions, they just boot up, recognise each other and cooperate.