Meindert,
Very nice to hear from you again. You have been away quite some time. I
can't believe I am hearing this from you. You are the perfect person for
this thread. I think you need to think a bit outside of the box. As you
know, each NMEA manufacturer today is addressing the inadequacies of NMEA
with their own propriety solutions and selling them as the next best thing
in boat electronics, like SeaTalk. Yet we have a huge, inexpensive
commercial infrastructure all around TCP/IP and yet the marine industry is
trying to reinvent the wheel. You should revel in this foolishness and
consider this as a golden opportunity to develop a transport network like
the CAN bus SAE J1939 standard, but using TCP/IP as the flexible transport
medium. Where the entry and exit ports are box standard NMEA, but are in
fact intelligent gateways to the Ethernet transport. You can buy off the
shelf single chip TCP/IP support and inexpensive switches. I see these
gateways programmable as talkers or listeners with a central
router/controller accepting the NMEA inputs and buffering them as well as
distributing them by IP address at any rate the listener required. This
solution solves all the NMEA problems and by developing additional gateway
flavors, solves all the compatibility issues between devices and
manufacturers. Most of this already exists inexpensively. All it takes is a
little ingenuity to integrate it into a total package. I think the market is
huge. There are a lot of floating customers out their just waiting for this.
Please also keep in mind that this same transport can also move all data
types including other, unrelated traffic like audio, video and other
computer related data streams.
Steve


"Meindert Sprang" wrote in message
...
"Bill Kearney" wrote in message
t...
He's also failing to grasp the TINY size of the marine electronics
market.
Much like the naive fools that rant about how their boat isn't serviced
like
their Honda.

And that is exactly why marine instruments will not support an ethernet
interface with TCP/IP because it is simply too expensive to implement. And
surely people will now tell me that I can buy an ethernet card for my PC
for
less than $5. But this will simply not happen for the relatively small
marine market.

Meindert