"Poit" wrote in message
00.119...
I'm not whining about complexity. I'm just thinking that it would be nice
to get away from NMEA. As I said in the original post that if an open
standard were created it would eliminate un-nesessary costs.

The NMEA standard IS an open standard. The information is available to
anyone who wants it. And yes, you have to pay a small fee to get th standard
on paper but that is quite a normal procedure. Manufacturers do not pay
royalties or whatsoever for NMEA devices.

But I agree that there could be s more mature version, created by all of us,
still using cheap standard serial comms (no ethernet), in ASCII and capable
of having multiple devices on one bus. A similar standard exists and is
called SeaTalk. This one however is binary but it wouldn't be a problem to
create an ASCII variant of it, running on a comfortable high speed and
having a better hardware layer that is insensitive for interference and
still be cheap (CAN style).
And to ease implementation, the ASCII data could still be in NMEA format
which everyone already supports.
So basically, just a change in the hardware layer could take NMEA up to the
next level.

Meindert