I know about NMEA2000 but I just don't like it. I think the standard may be useful for high speed boats, where data rates of serial may not be sufficient. But I have a sailboat. My main concern is convenience and saving electric power. Running ethernet bus does nothing for the latter (and not very convenient due to their weird wiring requirements - gotta use coax, all sorts of weird connectors that tend to fail, hubs - I have enough of that stuff at work). So NMEA2000 is almost a negative to me
But I do appreciate a point of the user interface, and preloaded
charts might be a good way to equalize.
Ok, so say I get
Garmin and use one NMEA interface to connect the
autopilot. Now I want to connect DSC
radio and depth sounder (and may be wind instrument one day) - how do I do that if there is only one NMEA 183 port left?