Quoted from Doug >>>
Some years ago, my friend Rick and I started a small marine electronics firm, New Generation Technologies. He was president and I was technical director. I was hoping to get something started to let me exit gracefully from the Rocket Ranch, and he is one of those guys who just wants to be a CEO, of whatever.

Our idea for a product was a PC-based system that would use sensors to monitor stuff all around the boat and would display the information on a screen - both Nav data and whatever other useful stuff - a compass, autopilot function, all the engine instrumentation, and so on. More advanced things like dead reckoning and maintenance planning would also be possible.

This was the golden age of DOS but I didn't like the Microsoft product (I still don't) mostly because it would not run from ROM and I wanted to boot from ROM and not have a disk at all. So we used DR-DOS on ROM and booted into a .COM file also in ROM, which then ran from RAM. There were no good video drivers at the time (just pre-windows) so I wrote my own driver for a variety of scaleable meter types and displays. We had a couple of DACs to read sensors, and bought a compass repeater, fuel level sensors, and a LORAN-C all with computer interfaces.

Rick was mostly interested in a sailboat implementation, and I felt that the powerboat market in South Florida was the one to hit -- the gold chain and babes bunch will spend anything on their Cigarettes. I found that most of the needed software was common, and so put together the code for the various functions in one executable, since it all fit in under 64K of machine code I didn't have to write a memory controller.

We joined NMEA at some expense (I think it was about $450/year) and I contributed some to their first interface standard. I had the idea of using an existing interface such as RS-232 and just defining waterproof connectors and a software protocol. Others must have thought the same thing, since that is pretty much what they did. I proposed a fixed protocol like a telemetry bit stream where each digit would be in a known location. They ignored me and chose a looser protocol that had to be parsed since data could have various lengths, etc. All things considered, they were right.

When we had a good demo ready, we took it around to various venture capitalists, but had little luck. A try with the engine manufacturers was about the same. They showed a lot of interest in how it was implemented, but little interest in buying any.

I talked to Piper and others about putting the idea in airplanes, but we all knew that established firms were soon to come out with glass cockpits for big jets, and there didn't seem to be a market for a cheap version.

I hand-assembled ten complete units for a go-fast guy in Miami, which paid some of our expenses. We contributed considerable time and effort to NMEA, with no payback. We did get a lot of industry statistics to put into our business plan, and that was probably worth the money. With the demise of New Generation Technologies, my contact with NMEA ceased, but I have been following their development of standards with some interest.

I think the new standard is too complex mechanically. The backbone system or a daisy chain could have been implemented with coax, using ethernet protocol and carrying the power on the center conductor. If the power made it, the signal would be there too. The CAT-5 systems used today are popular NOT because there is an advantage to having 8 wires, but because shielded twisted pair and RJ-45 connectors are much cheaper than anything in coax. The savings in marine-grade equivalents are just not there. As for power on the center conductor, it works fine. Most antenna-mounted TV amplifiers use it.

Rick and his lovely wife Susa have been cruising the South Pacific by sailboat for the last ten years. He has a full set of Raymarine goodies that do everything we dreamed of for our system. From time to time I get lovely photos and a note from them. I started buying Marinettes. I have been retired now for five or six years and haven't written a line of code. I never hear from NMEA.

Sorry to be so long-winded, it's a problem with us old folks.....

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