Parsing the NMEA press release

"NMEA TAKES AIM AT UNAUTHORIZED USE OF ITS STANDARDS

Action designed to protect ownership rights

SEVERNA PARK, MD—Every year the National Marine Electronics Association (NMEA) and its volunteer members spend significant amounts of time, effort and money to create data exchange Standards that benefit the entire marine industry. Many users comply with the NMEA licensing agreement, which requires purchasing use of the Standards, but some do not. NMEA has announced that it will take whatever action is necessary to protect its ownership rights to these Standards and collect payments for their use.

“The NMEA is a member-supported industry organization that supports the marine electronics industry by providing technical training and the development of various Standards,” said Johnny Lindstrom, Chairman and Acting Executive Director of NMEA. “The Standards developed and released are the sole property of our members. 

“Over the years we have been too lax in enforcing our rights under various copyright and intellectual property rights laws. By doing so, our members have missed benefiting from the revenue that should be realized from the use of these technologies. We are embarking on an effort to aggressively enforce these rights and collect for the use of our technologies by numerous individuals and businesses around the world.  

“Did you know that the cell phone network infrastructure timing is, in some cases, using the ‘UTC Time’ sentences from our NMEA 0183 Standard for synchronization? I have a major cell carrier ‘air card’ that has NMEA 0183 functions in it; I find no record of this carrier ever purchasing the rights to use this Standard.  

“This is just one instance; there are numerous cases where ‘NMEA 2000 compatible’ or some variation of this description is used. There is no such thing as ‘NMEA 2000 compatible’—the product is either certified or it is not, as stated in the NMEA licensing agreement. 

“By allowing this abuse of our Standards we are cheating those that play by the rules and by doing so support the maintenance of existing Standards and the development of future ones. In the past, the only way NMEA has known about any of these violations is by members contacting us. I ask all of our members to be more diligent and to alert the NMEA National Office of any abuses of our rights, so that we may pursue enforcement of these rights by whatever means available.”

About the NMEA

Founded in 1957, the NMEA has led the way in establishing technical Standards for data exchange in marine electronics, with the widely accepted NMEA 0183 data protocol, NMEA 2000® and certification Standards for marine electronics technicians. NMEA Standards and programs focus on insuring that the boating consumer is provided with reliable products and professional service. For more information, visit the NMEA website at www.NMEA.org or call (410) 975-9425."

SiRF Star III GPS and antenna

When I first read the press release I was a startled. There certainly was more than some righteous indignation present mixed in with a dose of "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going going to take it anymore." I also maybe sensed a bit of fiscal concerns peeking out from under the covers. Why else the threat of aggressive enforcement after all these years?

Signal K is afoot.

I wish to communicate with you!

I know the vast majority of you have never heard of "Signal K" and until recently I hadn't either. Signal K is a collaboration by several open source boating related software developers who have worked together to create a common data management framework to support their efforts.

This includes the open source CANboat and browser oriented Navguage projects. CANboat is largely dedicated to reverse engineering NMEA 2000 PGN's to allow others to access the specific data elements such as boat speed or wind angle.

Comm wiring awry

The navigation gear works well, but it's old enough to have been purchased from Ye Olde Marine Electronics Chandlery, and the NMEA interfacing to the new laptop has taken forever. Six weeks alone on and off mucking around with the Actisense/PC interface, only to discover that Window's automatic updates were changing the USB driver when I wasn't looking. It was like gremlins were sneaking in at night, killing the good elves, stealing the shoes they made, and doing their software evil.

I have no comm port so I must scream

Six weeks ago I embarked on what should have been a fairly mundane task of getting NMEA data from a GPS and some older Simrad gear imported into a laptop running Nobletec's Odyssey Time Zero navigation software. This wasn't my first time at the NMEA data rodeo, and the results were pretty typical. Using the existing Prolific serial to USB converter I could only have one talker, and one listener, not that I didn't try to get a second talker to work. Alas, but not unsurprisingly one talker only for you, and some of the older NMEA version data was getting lost in translation. To help with these issues a Actisense NDC-4 was purchased.

Playing with PuTTY and NMEA

"Welcome to "This is your life,", and please give a warm welcome to our surprise guest NMEA 1.5."

"Well NMEA 1.5, how are you feeling?" "Well I'm doing okay, I guess. I don't do much work anymore, and nobody calls me to do anything new. I mostly hang around in my ninth floor walk up apartment with my five cats and watch reruns on TV. I was important once you know, but today, not so much."

You piece of blagnab jetsam.

You styrene reeking floating piece of fracking junk! I hope your innards turn to outards, and your engines go visey-versey! I hates boats! It's just human nature to hates boats! Why dern you low down, son of a dugout canoe! You'll pay for this, you dog blasted, ornery, no account, bucket of fiberglass!  Look at what you no good fracking rawrbazzle wotten flea bitten varmints done did.

The NMEA 2012 conference

Who needs Vegas when you can go to the Royal Pacific Resort. You couldn't find a better place to hold the National Marine Electronics Association's 2012 annual conference. This is my second year as judge for the annual NMEA technology awards. I was joined by Tim Queeney, editor of Ocean Navigator magazine who is this year's senior judge. You know this because his robe has the four gold stripes. Glenn Law, editor of Saltwater Sportsman is our new judge who replaced Ben Ellison.

NEMA, oops I mean NMEA

Language is a wonderful and changeable thing.  Acronyms, and our attempts to pronounce them can bring about decidedly weird effects, so today we are discussing the National Marine Electronics Association, or in its acronym form NMEA. This is not to be confused with NEMA, the National Electrical Manufacturers Association, the National Emergency Management Association, or even the New England Multihull Association.

Somehow over linguistic time, the acronym NMEA has ended up being universally pronounced, such as acronyms can ever be pronounced, as Nee ma. This verbal utterance has become so pervasive, that the marine populous, has actually changed the spelling of the acronym NMEA to NEMA to reflect how we actually say the acronym. If you search "NEMA 0183" -NMEA, Google finds over 24,000 references. I did some snipping off the web of examples, and noted that even the Installer himself has screwed this up at times, and boy I'm not alone. I have purposely not changed it as a personal reminder to myself. 

The rate of change from NMEA, to NEMA has been increasing rapidly over time. There are a few references in the eighties, even more in the nineties, and in this decade using NEMA in place of NMEA is almost common place.

So there are are three options available, do nothing, and continue to pronounce NMEA as Knee ma, change the name of the National Marine Electronics Association to the National  Electronics Marine Association, or change the way we pronounce it to "NA Me Ah.  My vote is to be diligent about spelling it correctly, and to continue to pronounce it Knee ma, or Knee maw if you live in the south. Tomato, tomahto, potato, potahto. Nmea, (it is a word, sort of) that is a cool electronics network on your boat bro.

By the way this was all triggered by attending the NMEA conference on Sanibel Island (almost). I am just about done with the piece. 

The photo above was taken by Canadian Phil Boisse.

NMEA 2000, how do I love thee, let me count the ways, for now.

The OSI (Ohio Scientific Inc.) 300 computer you see below, is a very early microprocessor based computer, and it is the first computer I every owned. I bought it in 1975, or 1976, all shiny new, along with some of the most obscure technical documentation ever written. But with perseverance, I learned how to program it in machine language. This little computer sported a very brand new state of the art MOS 6502 8 bit microprocessor. There was no C in front of the MOS, which meant when you shut it off, it forgot everything it knew, and you started all over again. At the time, it truly was a technological marvel, but how quickly it became a dinosaur, and it has lived in my closet for many decades now, as a poignant reminder of my technological past, and how quickly time passes all of us by.

I was recently installing a NMEA 2000 backbone, attached to a Garmin 5212 system, and replacing almost all of the original NMEA 0183 wiring. I started thinking about my little antique computer above, and how quickly things change. When this Garmin system was installed, just a couple of years ago, it too was a technological marvel, and it included the brand new NMEA 2000 interface, but at the time, there was little NMEA 2000 gear available to plug into it, so during the original installation, all of the interfaces were NMEA 0183. 

In the beginning, when the NMEA 0183 system was cobbled together, life, was simple. Lard sold for a $1.00 a bucket, Ward and June Cleaver were still sleeping in separate beds, and there were few things available for your state of the art LORAN to talk to. Life became more complicated, and as new marine technology blossomed, the original software designs needed updating. New sentences were added, but the older equipment's software couldn't always digest it. Multiplexers were invented to support additional equipment, more new sentences were needed, and again older software had difficulties dealing with the new sentences. Boxes were devised to do translations for older equipment, and along the way, manufacturers started to ignore the standards, and added proprietary sentences, which enhanced the new features of their stuff, but often made headaches for other vendors stuff. To top all of this off, NMEA 0183 typically operated at the glacial speed of 4800 baud, which is now the computing equivalent of watching your fingernails grow.

But worst of all was the wiring interface. A zillion little color coded wires that were difficult to strip, terminate, and connect to anything. The jargon attached to the wires was also all mixed up. Is it a RX+ or a VE+,  NMEA ground, or ship's ground? So stare at the wiring diagrams, and lets see now, the orange/black TX+ of port 2, goes to the other system's blue/white receive port 4 VE+. You get the idea, everybody did something different. You want to see what's being sent, get a lap top with a serial port, wire up a DB 9 connector, crank up Hyper terminal in your Windows 98 computer, and read out the data. Awkward, dated, slow, inscrutable, out of control, and good riddance, unless of course you make your living selling multiplexers.

The marine communications gurus formed committees, and cloistered themselves in rooms with white boards, and did a good job of updating the old NMEA 0183, and created the vastly improved NMEA 2000. This was long over due, and a quantum leap forward. Gone were the little tiny colorful wires, and small plug and play connectors took their place. Now my label  maker can really be put to use. It was difficult to label wires that seemed to be the size of a human hair.

Since you can split up the NMEA 2000 backbone, multiple devices can be consolidated in one location, and you only need to pull one cable to another location. Two new Garmin N2K GPS units are being installed here, and only one wire needs to be pulled to the console. It could have been ten devices, and still one wire pull. Gone are the many wire runs between upper and lower consoles just to support inter-unit communications.

How are you going to keep then down on the farm when you can see a list of what's connected to the system? This is an enormous trouble shooting tool that allows you to quickly tell if devices are connected, and this will also generally tell you whether they have power, or not. This is a good start, but as I have learned, just because it is on the device list, it doesn't mean that the gear is working correctly. I was plugging devices in and out of the backbone, and  using the device list to identify the cables for labeling, and it caused the Garmin 600 AIS to freeze up. A power reset corrected this, but what I would like to see is a N2K diagnostic page that would allow you to see if the units are sending data correctly. If the box can read it, it should be able to display it. While I'm showing a picture of a Garmin 5212 above, did I mention I want a QWERTY keyboard, or am I repeating myself, again?

The old NMEA 0183 was restricted to 32 character strings, and a lot of the hardware that used it would choke on things it didn't understand. NMEA 2000 seems to have solved this problem. If a system sees things it is not going to use, it just ignores it, as long as the "PGN" sentence is correctly written, and speaking of  sentences, there is now a huge array of them, and the list is growing everyday.

The Garmin system above has 12 devices hanging on the system, and it works seamlessly. Doing this with the old NMEA 0183 would have been possible, but not without tribulations, mysterious black boxes, gnashing of teeth, miles of wire along the way, and less than perfect integration. So good job NMEA 2000, lets now see how long it will last.

So lets flash ahead in our time machine, and we will let history repeat itself. Manufacturers will design propriety equipment, and software that won't work, and play well with others, in order to get some marketing edge, or increased margins, or both. Marine technology will continue to advance, more data will have to be moved even faster, GPS technology will change, and three or four decades from now, someone like me will stare wistfully at the antique Garmin 5212 in his closet, and fondly remember this relic that was his very first, "state of the art" chartplotter. 

The photo above is a Radio Direction Finder (now a relic) and was taken by K. Krallis, and was uploaded from Wikipedia Commons.

Joe Williams sent this additional photo to me, and I think it fits perfectly. When was the last time anyone handled, or used one of these cards?  The rebel in me wants to fold, spindle, and mutilate it. Thanks Joe
.