Something I'd like to point out: The market goes beyond boating. There
are others including aviation,

I'm sure the FAA would laugh in your face at that.

automotive, sporting, surveying, research,
and I'm sure many others. NMEA is present in most if not in all of these
areas.

And working quite well. Besides trying to shore up a weak argument, is
there a point here?

This is another reason why I'd like to see changes made. Open
architecture
that is extensible, so that these other areas may be addressed easier.

Bull**** again, and Meindert calls you on it in the next message.

The electrical part of the standard is brilliant in the use of CAN. My
argument is mainly about the sentence structure and how it is retreived
and
used. 0183 is great because it is human readable, somewhat rs-232
compatible, and easy to implement. Also there is enough information
floating around the web to figure out how to use it. This is not the case
with 2k.

Ah yes, the old "human readable" bogus argument. Are jpeg files human
readable? How about mp3 files? And yet they're amazingly useful in meeting
the needs of their applications.