I thought I could write this post much earlier, but then. Well. Make sure whoever you employ for doing work on your boat will give you a diagrams, plans and documentation. I do not have any documentation from the company who installed my electronics, my request was just, well, ignored. So what normally will take only a day to do, if at all, and if you know where your cables run, and if you know that when you extend a 4-wire cable with a 4-wire cable you will connect all the wires, even you only need two right then… and won’t put that connection into the most difficult to reach location. Well then it could be quite quick.

For me it wasn’t. While in fact, it’s really very straightforward. A install the AIS box, B connect power, C install the NMEA cable, voila, done. Installing the unit and power was an easy task. Installing the NMEA cable would have been easy if these guys would have extended the 4-wire Raymarine cable properly with their own and not only connecting two wires. The cable was in place, from the cockpit steering pedestial to the nav table, it served GPS coordinates for the DSC VHF. It took me an afternoon to figure that it wasn’t my stupidity in reading wiring diagrams (connect TX+ to RX+, TX- to RX-, wow!).

So I had this cable fixed, then ran it back to the AIS install spot (which is in my aft workstation cabin). Setting the NMEA Port Speed to 38400 kills the NMEA output for the VHF (or so I think, I haven’t actually tested it) so I had to find another source of GPS signal. Luckily, I found a solution to this.

Autopilot Course Computer has NMEA output

Taking the NMEA GPS coordinates from NMEA Port 2 of the course computer

While prying open covers I discovered that the smart pilot course computer has two NMEA channels. For some strange reason I got a signal on port 1 (my voltmeter showed me that, a NMEA logger would have come in handy) however the VHF said “no position / no time) But NMEA port 2 worked like a charm! I suspect that either I didn’t connect it properly (unlikely) or that it is in fact the same NMEA port that is accessed thru the Chartplotter, thence running at 38400 baud.

DSC VHF shows coordinates & time

The NMEA coordinates from the course computer show up on the DSC VHF.

Above picture shows the coordinates that is being sent from the course computer. I was relieved to finally have this working without need to pay $$$ for a NMEA extender.

Here’s a screenshot of the E80 with AIS enabled.

AIS Overlay on Raymarine E80 plotter

The E80 shows the ships that are being located by the AIS engine

One thing I could not get to work, sadly, is the feature to disable the AIS-B transponder. If I select the option, the AIS fails to switch to silent mode. I guess right now this would only work with the Raymarine Transponder, hopefully either ACR or Raymarine will get their act together to support this. Then I could turn off the transponder without leaving the cockpit.

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