Yeah, it would be great to go to best buy and get an ethernet hub for
the boat. It would rely on 120vac (but that is fixable) and it would
allow me runs up to 300', repeaters, and routing. JUST what I need on a
43' boat.

Ethernet is AWESOME when you have LOTS of hosts that you want/need to
address individually. Note how well multicast has done. If they used
ethernet for the NMEA spec, it would be a total horror show. AND all of
your devices would cost more as the manufacturers would have to do MORE
software engineering to compensate for ethernets shortcomings for this
applicaiton. Dont get me wrong, NMEA is totally bjorked, but using
ethernet would NOT have been the answer. If manufacturers want to use
ethernet for their proprietary data transfers, thats cool, but why make
my temp sensor use a heavy ethernet interface?

I for one welcome our new CAN bearing overlords and am looking forward
to their benelovent, data sharing rule.


On Jan 6, 12:07 am, Larry wrote:
"Chuck Tribolet" wrote :

Larry, that's NMEA 2000, except it uses CAN bus rather than Ethernet.

It's starting to show up in some GPSs, but I haven't seen any DSC VHFs
with it. Yet.Yeah, I know, CANbus, another queer, off-the-wall, stupid plan from NMEA
trying to keep the boater from buying READILY AVAILABLE, reasonably-priced,
off-the-shelf, STANDARDIZED data hardware that uses STANDARDIZED
connectors.

Just look at all the wonderful CANbus boxes you can buy at Best Buy or
Circuit City or newegg.com or any computer shop! Everybody knows a lot
about CANbus....must be 20, maybe 30 people, worldwide who are not
designing CAR computers!

http://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/e...Doc/adn004.pdf

Wanna bet the CONTROLLER in Garmin will NOT work quite right with the
CONTROLLER in Icom or the CONTROLLER in Raymarine or the CONTROLLER in
anything else?

We'll see......too late.