LowranceNet 2, look what's in the basement!
Check this out (big size )! It’s the most elaborate test setup a manufacturer ever loaned me, and I learned a lot from it. What you’re looking at is a LowranceNet (aka NMEA 2000) network suitable for, say, a spiffy T-top fishing boat. On top are the sensors: GPS, fuel flow, 3 tank levels, water speed, and 2 water temps. On the bottom are 4 digital gauges capable of showing most any data on the network, plus the LCX 111c HD (hard drive!) fishfinder/plotter, which can also display gauge type data. It all works together quite nicely, and in Miami I got a ride on an actual T-top equipped with all this gear plus a pair of NMEA-2000–talking Evinrude Etec outboards. I saw smooth data integration across the network, with flexible and redundant displays. Oh, there’s a kink or two, which I’ll write about later, but today I want to address my earlier concerns about LowranceNet. If you recall, most of the gear above is NMEA certified but the backbone plugs and cabling are not. Back in Oct. I understood there’d be some resolution to this issue, but so far…nothing. However, I’ve been told by a Lowrance engineer that this cable, though much smaller and less expensive, meets the same specs for shielding, etc. as the certified stuff I tried last summer. Some of which I’m still holding on to (thank you, Raymarine and Maretron). That’s why I was able to try a simple patch cable (above at left) to connect a regular NMEA 2000 device to the LowranceNet backbone. I was even able to marry the Lowrance backbone to the certified backbone with various Maretron units and an E120 hanging off it. Everything powered up and was relatively happy. I do hope Lowrance can get its cable fully legit, but if it works fine—and it seems to—does it really matter?
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Yes, the connector does matter. The whole point of a network standard is interoperability. The vendors all seem to be trying to hide behine proprietary connectors as their last wall of defense to customers buying multi-vendor systems.
This battle was fought 20 years ago in the computer industry, it's OVER. Give the customer real interoperability and they'll buy more stuff more frequently because it's easy to hook up!