Airmar PB200 hands-on #1, & into the delivery box!
I'm once again way behind on testing borrowed products, and my apologies to all manufacturers involved. The Airmar PB200 Weather Station above is a case in point. I mentioned how well it feeds NMEA 2000 data to the lab network back in February, and Dan Corcoran shared his beta testing experience before that, but there's a lot more to say. For instance, I didn't really understand how it delivered both NMEA 0183 and 2000 data -- did it use one of the various junction boxes available to translate from one protocol to the other? -- until I got my hands on the sample. Now I know that the PB200 flat out does it all! ...
Picture the N2K cable above feeding GPS, heading, wind, air temp, and barometric pressure to every N2K device that knows those PGNs, plus to CE 2009 via the Maretron USB100 gateway. Meanwhile the Combiner box's USB output is going to another laptop running Airmar's Weather Station software, and it could be feeding most any other 0183 aware program. Plus it could have, say, 0183 depth and speed info combined in at the Combiner box, and/or could be using the box's 0183 output to feed a plotter. In other words, the PB 200 could supply a lot of data to a big yacht full of NMEA devices, or it can be set up simply to plug into one flavor or the other. Damn!
I look forward to seeing for myself how good that data is on the water, but I wasn't done with the lab experiments. I thought I'd stress test CE 2009 by adding the Combiner's USB output...and the output of the Digital Yacht AIT250 (now being sold in the USA by Cactus Navigation)...and...what the hell...the IP AIS feed mentioned recently. Check out the screen shot; CE handled all four inputs with style and grace. By right clicking on my boat icon I can choose from any of the three GPS feeds (and CE will automatically roll over if the active feed fails). And note how much network data, mostly N2K, is showing in the panels. GPS signal strength would be there too, if...
...if I was using the Maretron GPS feed. For some reason, signal strength doesn't get through from the Class B AIS (aka Keyspan USB) or from the PB200 via the Combiner, but does from the USB100 (though it's all 0183 when it gets to CE). There were a few other fairly minor glitches like this, discussed a bit more in the slide show below (I got a little carried away!), but I'm not too concerned about them. That's because as sweet as the above is in terms of PC charting, I'm hoping that we're about to go to the next level, which will be straight up NMEA 2000 data to programs like CE via an Intelligent Gateway (NMEA claims it's finally coming). But (more than) enough for now. Am I going to take CE and the PB200 along on the Gizmo delivery tentatively routed above? Hell yeah.
Hi Ben,
About CE displaying TWA even though it has no HDG and STW information. Since the PB200 has its own built in GPS and heading sensor it can calculate and output the shown wind information by itself.
The reason why CE is not displaying HDG and STW when you have disconnected the NMEA2000 gateway is probably that these sentences are disabled on the 0183 output in the PB200. By using the Weathercaster software you can configure the PB200 to which sentences it should output on the NMEA0183.
Marinplus AB distribute Rose Points CE 2009 and ECS products in Sweden. We also distribute Airmar's products and have done quite some tests on the setup with CE 2009 and PB200. It is definitely a great combination of products.
Thanks for the superb Panbo blog, I read it every day!