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A-Link TITAN NMEA (COM30) Driver



posted 05-12-2014 12:47 PM ET (US)

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LINK-8 VHF Marine Band Radio
NMEA-0183 Interface

The Lowrance LINK-8 VHF Marine Band radio provides many attractive features at a comparatively modest price point of about $300. The radio is a Class-D DSC qualified radio, as it must be to be sold in the USA, and it has an internal automatic identification system or AIS receiver. The marine radio and AIS receiver share a common antenna. The radio also has data interfaces for NMEA-0183, which is quite common, and for NMEA-2000, which is not so common. Radios from other manufacturers with all these features sell for about twice as much as the Lowrance LINK-8.

I have a LINK-8 on my bench for some testing, and I needed to work out the NMEA-0183 wiring interface. The radio provides all of its serial data interfaces on an accessory socket, and a mating plug connector with a short cable to a wire fan out is provided. The wiring of this interface is a bit complicated, and it took me a few minutes to work out the signals and wire colors. I found there were three sets of interfaces on this connector or wire fan out.

The first set of signals from this interface are apparently fixed at 4800-BPS, the standard NMEA-0183 baud rate, and are intended to interface with an external GNSS receiver (for input of position data to the radio from the receiver) or to interface with a chart plotter (for output of digital selective calling data to the chart plotter from the radio).

A-Link TITAN NMEA (COM30) Driver

Lowrance has attached two tags to the Yellow and Green wires as aids in identifying their purpose. The tags say GPS(+) on yellow and GPS(-) on green. This just confuses me, but maybe it helps someone else.

The LINK-8 also provides additional data lines, which are operating at the NMEA-1083-HS (high speed) baud rate of 38400-BPS. This interface is apparently intended to send AIS data to a chart plotter or AIS plotter. The data rate is eight times faster because an AIS receiver can produce a lot of data output per second, and all the data might not fit into a lower speed serial data link. Using a menu selection on the radio interface for set up, the port speed on this 'AIS' port can be set back to 4800 if desired. Lowrance does warn about possible loss of data at this speed.

The above signals are identified as being RS422. This is a differential signal output signal. There is no input port provided.

TITAN

Curiously, the LINK-8 has a third serial data output port, which also operates at the 38400-BPS rate, but is configured as an RS-232 port, an unbalanced interface. The wiring for that is as follows:

This is also an output port, and there is no input port provided.

To interface the LINK-8 to a chart plotter or terminal in order to observe the chart plotter response to its data output or to capture the data on a terminal, and using my Universal NMEA-0183 wiring and connector plan, I interfaced the radio data wires as follows: