NMEA

NMEA
Name	NMEA
Abbreviation	NMEA
Founded	1957
Headquarters	Virginia
Scope	Maritime electronics data protocol

NMEA is a family of standards that defines electrical and data formats for communication between navigation and marine electronics devices. It provides serial sentence structures, timing, and device roles used by receivers, autopilots, radios, and displays. The standard is widely implemented in shipping, aviation, scientific research, and hobbyist projects.

Overview

The specifications describe sentence formats and protocols used by devices such as Garmin, SiRF Technology, Furuno Electric Co., Ltd., Raytheon Technologies, Lowrance, and Simrad Yachting. Manufacturers including Garmin, Navico, Trimble, Honeywell International, Thales Group, and Northrop Grumman implement the sentences in products alongside systems from Apple Inc., Dell Technologies, Intel Corporation, and NVIDIA. The ecosystem spans instruments from Kongsberg Gruppen and Emerson Electric to research platforms operated by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory, and NOAA. Major adopters include navies such as United States Navy, Royal Navy, People's Liberation Army Navy, and commercial fleets managed by Maersk, CMA CGM, and Mediterranean Shipping Company. Standards bodies and institutes like IEEE, ISO, IEC, IETF, and SAE International influence implementation practices.

History

Early marine electronics firms such as National Marine Electronics Association, established interactions among companies like Furuno, Garmin, and Raytheon to standardize serial messaging. The protocol evolved through interactions with suppliers including Siemens, Mitsubishi Electric, Yokogawa Electric, and sensor makers like Honeywell and Bosch. Adoption followed on commercial vessels registered with organizations like Lloyd's Register, Bureau Veritas, and Det Norske Veritas (DNV), and through integration into projects backed by NASA, European Space Agency, Australian Antarctic Division, and university marine programs at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, University of Cambridge, and University of Oxford. Regulatory frameworks from agencies such as Federal Aviation Administration and International Maritime Organization shaped usage in aviation and maritime safety systems.

NMEA Sentence Formats

Sentences are ASCII text lines beginning with talker identifiers used by manufacturers such as Garmin and Trimble, and followed by comma-separated fields familiar to implementers at SiRF Technology and Furuno. Common sentence types include position, velocity, time, and status messages consumed by chartplotters from Navico and autopilots by Raymarine. Parsers in libraries maintained by projects like OpenCPN, gpsd, QGIS, MATLAB (MathWorks), and GNU Radio expect formats resembling those in consumer receivers by u-blox and MediaTek. Sentence checksum and field conventions parallel practices seen in protocols developed by IBM, Microsoft, Google, and Oracle Corporation for device interoperability.

Communication Protocols and Physical Layers

Historically, serial interfaces such as RS-232 and RS-422 are common on equipment from Furuno and Lowrance, while modern implementations may use USB adapters sold by Monsoon Multimedia, Sabrent, and FTDI or network transports like Ethernet and Wi‑Fi from Cisco Systems and Netgear. Integration into vehicle systems leverages bus technologies used by manufacturers like General Motors, Ford Motor Company, Toyota Motor Corporation, and avionics vendors like Garmin and Honeywell with avionics suites from Collins Aerospace. Satellite navigation inputs from constellations such as GPS (United States), GLONASS (Russia), Galileo (EU), and BeiDou (China) feed receivers produced by Trimble, Septentrio, and Topcon.

Applications and Uses

Applications span commercial shipping managed by MSC Cruises and logistics groups like FedEx and UPS; recreational boating brands such as Beneteau and Sunseeker; aviation platforms from Boeing and Airbus; scientific campaigns by NOAA, European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites, and research vessels at Scripps Institution of Oceanography; and autonomous vehicle projects at Waymo and Tesla, Inc.. Integration into GIS workflows uses tools from Esri, QGIS, and ArcGIS Online, while marine GIS and survey systems by Teledyne CARIS and HYPACK ingest sentences for charting and bathymetry. Emergency systems in lifeboats and distress beacons reference guidance from International Maritime Organization and SOLAS.

Limitations and Interoperability

The sentence-based ASCII design imposes bandwidth and precision constraints noted by instrument vendors including Furuno, Garmin, Navico, and testing labs at DTU and NPL (National Physical Laboratory). Ambiguities in talker identifiers and manufacturer-specific sentences have led to fragmentation among suppliers like SiRF Technology, u-blox, MediaTek, and Broadcom Corporation. Interoperability efforts involve software stacks from OpenCPN, gpsd, QGIS, and corporate integrators such as ABB and Schneider Electric. Modern requirements for timestamping and high-rate telemetry drive adoption of supplemental protocols from NTP, PTP (IEEE 1588), NTRIP, and messaging systems like MQTT and DDS used by RTI and Eclipse Foundation projects.

Implementations and Tools

Open-source projects and commercial SDKs provide parsers and simulators used by entities including OpenCPN, gpsd, QGIS, MATLAB (MathWorks), LabVIEW (National Instruments), ROS (Open Robotics) Foundation, and Apache Kafka integrations for telemetry. Hardware and accessory vendors such as Actisense, Garmin, Furuno, u-blox, Trimble, SiRF Technology, and FTDI offer converters, development kits, and evaluation boards. Testbeds and certification tools are used by classification societies like Lloyd's Register and labs at Intertek, UL, and TUV Rheinland.

Category:Marine electronics