Vesper Cortex and away the NMEA problems

Unfortunately on a boat we have always been subject to the NMEA protocols. While it is good that all manufacturers have aligned themselves to the same protocol, the limitations of protocols devised more than 20 years ago are evident. Signal K with its noble data structure in JSON is much more evolved, but it too already shows limits and it is easy to assume that the NMEA will be used for many years to come and that Signal K will perhaps remain yet another vain attempt to break the status quo dictated by the NMEA organization.

In short, today we find ourselves in the situation of running today's technologies on protocols structured for the needs we had on the boat 20 years ago, when owning a GPS was the height of ambition. To give an example, the bandwidth of the most recent NMEA2000 is 250Kbs, which is a thousand times less than that of a 4G connection and is equal to the CDN Internet connection that our company had in 1998.

The situation is complicated by the fact that on board many instruments still transmit in NMEA 0183 and if you do not have appropriate combiners, you end up with only confusion inside this bus, which can also lead to problems for navigation.

This is exactly what the technological limit of today's boats has just been described! We can also fill our boat with technology, but the information will have to travel on this old bus anyway.

The NMEA Gateway function can be represented as an advanced NMEA combiner, in simpler words it's the functionality that allows you to combine the various NMEA formats(0183 and 2000) on the boat and reorder all the data passage.

More specifically, all incoming NMEA0183 and NMEA2000 data are redigitalized to be reordered and filtered according to a correct synchronization, and then travel comfortably on the bus in NMEA 2000 or in the case of Cortex, retransmitted via WiFi or through the phone cells.

Vesper has been involved in this technology since its inception. It is a technology where you need the best software experts in asynchronous programming, where each cycle of data must be analyzed, to correct the next one that is matured by the analysis of several cycles. After all, this is Vesper's bread and butter and it has the best masters in the world in these technologies.

In the first paragraph we explained that the boating industry is still destined to live with the problems of these obsolete protocols, we have no way out if not to mitigate these problems with the technology of a Cortex.

A boat where the NMEA rulings are perfectly harmonised, is not only the dream of the most daring installers, but is more strictly a common requirement today.

For these reasons, the Cortex is the first device to be installed on board, only afterwards do you think about something else. While if we already have a boat well equipped with technology, we will insert it to solve existing problems, as well as benefit from all the advanced technology that the Cortex has.

The commercial impacts of the NMEA Gateway can be summarized in two titles:

Performance improvement of all devices on board

When we install a Cortex we not only introduce in our boat a wide set of advanced technologies, but we also prepare it to make it easier the entry of other technologies, in fact through the NMEA gateway functionality it becomes easier to integrate any other device of any brand, thus improving the performance of all devices on board.

On board with any brand

Before Cortex, it was advisable to integrate devices of the same brand on a boat, because this ensured a better dialogue between the various tools connected to the system. Today with Cortex and the state of the art NMEA Gateway technology, our world becomes freer. We would no longer be bottled within the limits of a certain brand, but we would only buy the best of the production for each brand, knowing that the dialogue will then be facilitated by Cortex.