Larry,
You normally have your act together, but not this time. Meindert is correct about his stated risks, but he is overstating the cost
of Ethernet solutions. Today they are canned in firmware and reasonably priced. The savings in installation complexity,
drastically increased speed and system flexibility far exceeds any increase in component cost. Please don't get me wrong. 802.11
has its place, but not in systems where data integrity are safety issues. CAN solutions work well and meet equipment
manufacturer's requirements, but as an end user I must counter with a standardization argument. The only thing that is standard is
the CAN pipe, everything else is proprietary and manufacturer unique. The ability to mix and match instruments and devices from
different manufacturers would virtually disappear. Furthermore, the CAN bus is slow in relation to Ethernet, reducing the amount
of net users and traffic the pipe could ultimately handle. Then there is the question of physical pipe length and noise
susceptibility. Ethernet has it all covered, but Meidert and I have had this discussion a while back and I didn't convince him
then. Maybe today, he's older now.
Steve
"Larry" wrote in message ...
Auspicious wrote in news:a4752c71-2ca1-4c14-92a5-
:
I agree with Meindert. I'd add to his list of challenges interference,
both internal and external. Internally, there are lots of shared
consumers on the same frequencies as wifi. Can you imagine the
scenario in which the autopilot can't find the GPS for heading data
every time your cell phone rings and your bluetooth headset goes off?
Or how about boats jockeying at the start line in a race where someone
else's instruments may be closer to your readout than your own? Not so
good.
All this MIGHT have been an issue, in 1985, but not today. I sit
watching TV at 1.2Mbps in a restaurant where wifi finds 12 open and 22
secured wifi hotspots in a 1 block area. The TV works fine, except my
Geelong Cats got beat (Aussie Rules Football). Noone intruded into my
system, noone sent false information to me, all that old radio nonsense
from.....well....1985.
These old arguments simply are no longer true. You sit playing on your
laptop in a marina full of laptops running off the marina wifi and
rarely ever see a problem.
What you all see as interference stopped when we went from dialup modems
into FM radios to 802.11a, the first edition of tiny pulsed transmitters
on broadband. Who apartment houses full of hundreds of wifi routers
feeding thousands of laptop computers works just fine....now at ever
increasing data rates over ever widening bandwidths to increase, even
further, the availability of more and more data to all.
Bluetooth isn't much better than an old serial port now. I wouldn't
even want to go near Bluetooth devices. The licensing fees, alone, are
a great reason to stay away. Bluetooth jams too easily as anyone in a
Best Buy can attest.
It's well past time to lay all these old wives tales from 1985 aside and
go wireless on all the boats NOT made of steel, which is most of them.
They'll still have NMEA's archaic ports for a long time or some
proprietary bus nonsense to prevent other manufacturers from talking to
Seatalk....but boaters should have that choice. NMEA will resist at all
costs. So won't the manufacturers all going in divergent ways with this
bus or that bus like Seatalk, for instance. Every boater suffers from
the consequences of this proprietary nonsense.....
--
iPhone 4 is to cellular technology what the Titanic is to cruise ships.
Larry