The Sailing Bug

A highly accurate (amusing) look at what’s what in the nautical world. It seems like a very apt entry for this website. It was cut from one of ‘those’ emails that goes around! If you are the author and I think it should not be here, I can only apologise and will of course take it off immediately… however at the same time, I would like to say that you must be a sailor to understand these things… good job!

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Today myself and Dave have spent most of today aboard Mystere doing to work on board. We have managed to move the GPS that was mounted in the chart table to where the other and unused GPS was in the cockpit area.

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Today myself and Phrixus where going to go back down to Mystere to finish of the installation of the NMEA multiplexer but first of all we had to finish off the reinstallation of the windscreen in his Mini Cooper. Apparently this is a task that should not take much more than 15 minutes but it did take just a little bit longer than that. One of the reasons was that the new windscreen seal was just a little bit bigger than the old seal hence when trying to fit it to the windscreen it kept on leaving a big spare bit that consequently meant the seal kept falling off. In the end we decided to give the old one a proper clean and fit it back in. 20 minutes, a pot of grease and the rather cunning use of a length of string the screen was installed.
Once that was out of the way, all that was left was for us to pop down and finally sort out the NMEA wiring. 2 hours and 2 overpriced coffees later everything was installed, tested and most importantly labelled. All that needs to be done with the NMEA network now is to setup an calibrate the Auto helm which we may get around to next weekend if we go for a sail off to Herm, Sark, Jersey or all of the above.

Today Phrixus and I popped down to have another go at sorting out the NMEA multiplexer on Mystere. After a quick Google search for the correct pin numbers of an RS232 plug we managed to get a homemade cable connected between the multiplexer and our laptop. It seems that we could have saved ourselves quite a bit of time the other night if we had RTFM in the first place! I managed to actually solder 3 joints in the cable without making a complete mess of it like I did the other night - soldering is definitely not a skill of mine!! As soon as we connected up the GPS to the NMEA talker port we started seeing data in Hyper Terminal on the laptop which was very welcome news.

After connecting up some of the other instruments and the Navtex unit we saw that information was being passed between units nicely. We have not yet got around to testing out the Auto Helm but that should be a fairly straight forward job. All that is left now is to properly label all of the cables, shorten or extend as necessary and wire everything up neatly and go out for a test sail. Hopefully we will be popping down tomorrow to make good and tidy up and make a start on some other things that need sorting out. I have also put some more pictures in the Gallery if you want to have a look.

I would have written this earlier but due to the aforementioned database issues I have been a bit busy. Myself, Phrixus and Gringod went down to the boat last night to have a look at the wiring for the NMEA multiplexer. Our main task for the evening was to connect the multiplexer to a laptop to check that it was sending out data. This involved connecting a home made RS232 port to the multiplexer then using an RS232 - USB converter to connect to the laptop. Unfortunately due to some confusion over the pin configuration on the plug we did not manage to actually get this working yet. The plan is to pop down tomorrow with new cable (Category 6 UTP cable is not very user friendly!!) and some proper notes on RS232 pin outs to get everything setup. This time I will actually remember to take my camera down and get some pictures as well.

What is NMEA?

Over the last 20 years, NMEA has slowly become the standard method by which marine electronics devices talk to one another. The standard specifies both the hardware connections that make up an NMEA system and the format of the data sentences that carry the NMEA information. The NMEA 0183 standard is a digital data transmission method, using ‘1’s and ‘0’s in a binary format, to communicate a digital representation of the required information (depth, speed etc.) to a connected instruments. All NMEA data is sent in the form of text sentences, each beginning with a $ symbol in plain “ASCII” text. We hope to monitor the installation of our network by viewing this data realtime in a Terminal application on our laptop.
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