MacSailing.net

I met this morning with the yard to talk about our direction regarding upgrading our electronics. We are planning on going with MacENC on a new MacBook. A couple of questions came up for which I was not sure of the answer.

From what I can tell, MacENC supports NMEA 0183 at this time. What plans are there to move to 2000?

If connected to an NMEA radar, will I be able to overlay the entire radar image onto the chart or just the AIS target info? Also, are only specific radar brands supported, or any unit that supports NMEA?

As I'm currently on a older 450MHz G4 machine with only 384Mb of RAM, I have only tried to demo GPSNavX so far, and it is, understandably, slow. I suspect the MacENC demo would severely tax my current system, if it would run at all, so I have not tried it.

Thanks

Our navigation software requires these NMEA messages to support RADAR..

$__RSD RADAR
$__TLL RADAR target
$__TTM RADAR tracked target

These will overlay any tracked targets and the cursor on the chart. The actual RADAR echo is not plotted on the chart.

MacENC runs best on the newer Intel Core Duo Macs.

But no plans for NMEA2000?

jagasail Wrote:But no plans for NMEA2000?

Bump!

It's 2008 and it looks like NMEA 2000 is doing quite well.

What's the Status of these (otherwise great) apps and NMEA 2000 compatibility?

I'm just about to outfit an IP38 with a new instrument pack and if I'm going to use MacOSX, do i actually have to downgrade my datacom to NMEA0183?

It'd be pretty nice to see MacENC throw up a few more (Spaces page configurable) data panes with Aqua/Quartz engine/tank/atmosphere etc data displays..


just a thought..


thanks in advance,


robert

The folks at NMEA have made it very difficult to support NMEA-2000 directly. The full protocol documents are very expensive and then there is a "certification" process which costs even more.
(By a lot, I mean north of $10K per product.)

Maretron makes a converter which transcodes 0183 and 2000 messages. In theory this should allow existing software to coexit with NMEA-2000, although I personally know of no testing along those lines to verify the conjecture.

It would be nice if there were a genuinely open protocol available for marine electronics, but NMEA-2000 ain't it. When you have to sign an NDA and pay lots of bucks to both read the docs and implement the protocol, it is *not* an open standard, no matter how many times they claim it is "open" for some weird definition thereof. This allows the NMEA "country club" complete control over who is allowed to play on their course.

harumph

-mo