I've had a week to digest all the buzz from the Lauderdale Boat Show.  It's already clear that NavNet3D was the big winner at the show but the other breakout performance award should go to NMEA2000.

The name is all wrong now.  It should have been called NMEA 2010, then it would look ahead of it's time instead of woefully behind, but the fact is that it's here now and it's here to stay.  All the major manufacturers in electronics, engines, electrical systems and monitoring have either already embraced the protocol or have something in the works. 

Many haven't called their version of NMEA2000 by it's name and I suspect that LowranceNet/SimNet/SeatalkNG, etc, are each respective manufacturers names for the protocol while they developed it for their products without having to actually get their products certified, which can be costly and time consuming. 

It shows most of these guys aren't dumb.  Why not get the protocol incorporated into your product, figure out what it's going to do, get the bugs ironed out and then submit it when customers actually start demanding it as a feature.

Maretron has been leading the NMEA2000 charge since the beginning and they are way ahead of the curve.  As a matter of fact I'm seeing more and more namebrand manufacturers incorporating Maretron components, weather stations, cables and such into their own product line.  Maretron has solid state compasses, GPS sensors, tank gauges and the aformentioned weather stations that all plug right into an NMEA2000 backbone. 

They have put the onus on Furuno, Raymarine and the rest of the multifunction display manufactures to develop applications within their products to display the various data coming from these sensors.

Octoplex, which is a sister company of Maretron, is an entire electrical system based on NMEA2000 which virtually eliminates mechanical breakers and thousands of feet of wiring generally installed on the average yacht.  A boat built with an Octoplex backbone and strategically placed Ethernet cable will literally be prewired for electronics right off production.

I saw some very curious yacht manufacturers spending a lot of quality time in the Octoplex/Maretron booth and it's absolutely the right move for a builder who is trying to reduce labor costs, weight and materials.

Simrad gets honorable mention for the new AP24 and AP28 pilots which are completely NMEA2000 interfaced.  In other words, each component, from the rudder feedback to the main processor to the control heads are connected to each other via NMEA2000 (SimNet) cables.  Think of the easy installation of an autopilot when an Octoplex or Maretron backbone is already run from stem to stern?