Coastal Explorer doesn't talk on NMEA 2000

[Mycroft]

I was helping a friend set up a new navigation system. He wanted a PC based system, so he bought a MS Surface Pro. We originally tried to connect his 0183 instruments to the surface with lots of serial->USB converters. Unfortunately, this was just too fragile with the numerous virtual com ports.

So we punted and he ordered a NMEA 2000 power supply, cables, and a few Actisense NGT and NGW converters. This was much more stable since there was only one com port connecting the Surface to the N2K bus. But when we opened Coastal Explorer to test the autopilot, we found that the NGT talker check box was grayed out! WTF? Digging through the CE support FAQs, we finally found a post that matched our problem and it said specifically that CE doesn't currently support talking on a N2K bus. They could have written something to that effect on all the pages about connecting the PC to N2K, but noooo.

We had to disconnect the autopilot from the N2K bus and connect it to the Surface with a second USB port to be able to talk to it from CE. Annoying.

Just wanted to get that info out there for anybody who might want to know.

[colemj]

The Actisense NGW is a 2000-0183 converter. Coastal Explorer will send 0183 data and it will be converted to 2000 and put on the bus by the NGW. This works for us.

A better option for him would be a 0183 multiplexer connecting all his 0183 stuff together led by a single USB cable (or wifi) to the computer.

Frankly, I'm not sure what you are doing with the N2K bus because you have no N2K instruments and using converters on two sides of a unused bus doesn't make much sense to me.

Mark

[tanglewood]

I'm not sure what you mean when you say CE won't talk on the N2K bus. Mine does. It's connect to N2K via the Rose Point NT50 adapter, receives all pertinent data off N2K, and "talks" on N2K to drive my autopilot.

So I think there must be something else going on. It's probably a translation limitation in one of the converters. I have found them to be very problematic.

[Mycroft]

Perhaps the mistake was in using the Actisense converter rather than the Rosepoint one.

[tanglewood]

Originally Posted by Mycroft

Perhaps the mistake was in using the Actisense converter rather than the Rosepoint one.

That could be. I've only used the Rose Point adapter and a Maretron USB100 with CE.