B&G Wind with Raymarine Chartplotter

[zboss]

We are going to be pulling our mast on our "new to us" boat next week. While we have it down I was thinking of replacing the wind sensor with a B&G since we don't anticipate pulling the mast for another 10. However we are NOT going to be upgrading the rest of the raymarine equipment with B&G until we are ready to quit our jobs in three years.

The raymarine system uses SeaTalkng and a lighthouse 2 chartplotter.

Will a B&G wind sensor work with this system?

- z

[DeValency]

You will also need the B&G wind unit/display at the cockpit. That unit should be able to talk with your Raymarine - considering it is NMEA2000 compatible. Most recent systems are.

[Bycrick]

My internet is too slow today for research, but I would think that B&G would have a masthead wind sensor that outputs NMEA 2000 data directly. I seem to remember that Simrad has a wind indicator with a small interface box that you place at the bottom of the mast which outputs N2K, so B&G should also.

If that’s true, then the Raymarine should display the data without problems. The only potential problem is if the wind unit needs proprietary PGNs of some sort for calibration.

[Bycrick]

WS310 Wind Sensor hooks directly to N2K network. It should read out just fine on any device that reads N2K PGNs. You shouldn’t need a B&G display.

[ilenart]

Note that if you have any problems you not like likely to get any support from either company. B&G will say its a problem with the Raymarine equipment and Raymarine will say its a problem with the B&G equipment. One of the pleasures of mixing suppliers.....not

Ilenart

[Gary Mc]

ilenart may well be correct, but if you buy from a decent local provider, the sales rep should be able to help you with any difficulties, mine certainly did.


Good Luck

[CaptTom]

NMEA is NMEA. If one device isn't able to see what the other device is sending, the problem is with the install, not compatibility between the devices. And with NMEA 2000, installation is just a matter of plugging in cables.

The only time compatibility becomes an issue is when one vendor starts using non-standard protocols. For example, Garmin chartplotters have a "special" way of sending routes to autopilots which no other vendor supports. Everything else works fine, including following to a waypoint. Only when the Garmin is dynamically routing is the AP unable to follow.

There will be no such compatibility issue with something as simple as wind speed and direction.

I'm in the market for a wind sensor, too, so I'll be following this thread. Feel free to post product recommendations!

[Bycrick]

NMEA 2000 isn’t just NMEA 2000. Like any specification or standard, there are grey areas which end up being defined on-the-fly by the implementation. So it’s entirely possible for a sensor to somehow "not be compatible" with a display.

A PURELY HYPOTHETICAL case. A Brand X wind sensor outputs only apparent wind speed and direction. You want to display on your Brand Y MFD the True Wind Speed and Direction. Will it work? Maybe. Maybe the Brand Y sensor has a built-in compass while the Brand X doesn’t. Where do you get heading data? Maybe the compass in the Brand Y unit only outputs magnetic heading. Who applies variation to correct magnetic to true? The complications CAN BE almost endless. Both units are properly conforming, but they won’t necessarily just plug-and-play. In this case, both vendors might justifiably say "It works as designed." They’d both be right.

But in reality, if you don’t want the system to be complicated, it can be remarkably simple. If you want the Raymarine MFD to show apparent wind, it will almost certainly work just fine.

[CaptTom]

Originally Posted by Bycrick

A PURELY HYPOTHETICAL case...

I'd be more likely to be swayed by an actual example.

My understanding is that there are a limited number of NMEA 2000 sentences (or whatever they call them in 2K) which relate wind speed and direction. I strongly doubt there's a whole lot of room for proprietary data formats. But obviously I'd be very interested if someone could prove this wrong.

[Bycrick]

Sorry I can’t give a specific example off the top of my head. There are a limited number of PGNs (the N2K versión of sentences). But each PGN can have multiple data fields and a device isn’t obligated to use them all. In addition, a device can send multiple PGNs. So there are a lot of combinations that are "valid" but might not work the way one might think. That has nothing to do with proprietary PGNs, which can be whatever the implementation wants.

[Bycrick]

CaptTom — it’s just taken me a while to come up with a good example for you. When I initially outfitted this boat, I had enough money, time and access to dealer-prices from a friend in the business. So I bought all the latest-greatest stuff.

The fanciest wind-speed-depth (DST) system. Latest radar. I wanted the radar/plotter to be able to overlay chart and radar data. That meant high-speed heading data from the autopilot, an extra cost option. All installed, all working just fine, except that every rare once in a while the DST system would lock up. About every week to ten days if you left it running. Hmmmmm, but not a big problem.

Next, hook up the autopilot 10Hz compass output to the radar for overlay. Works beautifully.

Then I decide to hook up the compass data to the DST to enable display of True Wind Speed/Direction and cockpit display of heading data. Works fine but now the DST locks up about every 3 days. That’s not getting better.

So then somebody suggests that I connect the GPS to the autopilot so that I can display it in the cockpit and steer to a waypoint. Works fine, except that now the DST system locks up in minutes, not days.

After a lot of head scratching, and a million calls to the tech support people, and on-boat visits by two factory people, we found the problem.

If the DST system was given "too much data over the network," it would lock up. Nobody knew quite how much was too much. The autopilot was putting out magnetic heading data at 10Hz. But it also was putting out unused and unneeded Rudder Position data every time it put out heading. So now the network load is doubled, causing the quicker failure of the DST.

What did the GPS have to do with this? It turned out that the GPS not only outputted position data, but one of the previously unused fields, Magnetic Variation, was now included. When the autopilot saw variation data, it decided to put out True Heading data as well as magnetic. That meant the network traffic was now triple what it had started at, which was enough to push the DST system over the edge.

The DST vendor sneaked around the problem by giving me a very expensive slower compass that hooked up directly, thus avoiding the problem.

So everything was working precisely as it was supposed to, but it wouldn’t work together.

[zboss]

Originally Posted by ilenart

Note that if you have any problems you not like likely to get any support from either company. B&G will say its a problem with the Raymarine equipment and Raymarine will say its a problem with the B&G equipment. One of the pleasures of mixing suppliers.....not

Ilenart

That's exactly why I am posting here. The response when I asked both companies was like when you are speaking to someone and they are saying "yes" and shaking their head "no".

Originally Posted by Bycrick

So everything was working precisely as it was supposed to, but it wouldn’t work together.

Someone should have a programmable NMEA firewall. I imagine that as boats become even more IOT then we will start seeing more of these issues.

[Bycrick]

But in response to the original post, I doubt there will be much of a problem with a simple apparent wind indicator having compatibility problems. If you’re really worried, call B&G for the PGNs that the WS310 outputs. I couldn’t find anything but the install manual on line. Then ask Raymarine what their MHU sends.

[Old_tar]

I mixed components from several brands ( B&G, Maretron, Furuno) without any big problems. BUT: for the Maretron wind sensor I needed a quite expensive hardware/ gateway to adjust the direction with the boats heading. The wind sensor did not accept the offset from the MFD.
So I would carefully check the manual how the WS310 has to be adjusted for a offset in heading.

[Tupaia]

Why not upgrade to an ultrasonic sensor that will work with all brands.
https://lcjcapteurs.com/en/
Their product and customer service are excellent.