On Sat, 31 Jan 2004 16:34:52 +0100, "Meindert Sprang"
wrote:

"Larry W4CSC" wrote in message
...

Fiber sounds great until you have to install it. Fiber requires
amazingly expensive equipment to splice and connector to it and
specialized training to do it right, things pleasure boaters will
simply not pay for. It's not an option when a large corporation or
the government bureaucrats aren't paying the bills.

There is also plastic fibre, the stuff that is also used for optical audio
links on high class CD players. This stuff needs no special tools. Just cut
it with a stanley knife, stuff it into the hole and tighten the plastic nut.
Ready.
Installed this way, it is good for 1Mbit/s over several 10's of meters. When
you polish the end with 8000 grit, you can go up to 15MHz over 50 meters or
so. Ideal stuff for some sort of NMEA-183Optical :-)

Meindert


Again, we are talking about ONE talker connected to ONE listener, the
same old NMEA crap problem that's making Meindert rich, now. Will we
make each unit an optical repeater to daisy-chain them together,
replacing the cabling monsters with fiber monsters?



Larry W4CSC

No, no, Scotty! I said, "Beam me a wrench.", not a WENCH!
Kirk Out.....

Too much silicon required for Bluetooth for cheap overall connections.
Firewire or 1401 is probably better for boats. Is a direct connect, run the
wires, and no problem with the next guy transmitting, and your Bluetooth
getting confused. Want Bluetooth wireless? Get a Firewire to Bluetooth
adapter. And a lot less non-ionizing radiation running around.
Bill

"Meindert Sprang" wrote in message
...
"Larry W4CSC" wrote in message
...
The radiation from the unshielded wires, with many of them sucking
noise from inside the shielded pair because you must hook one side
(NMEA B) to many grounds creating a giant HF antenna out of your
carefully shielded cabling, is the problem on the HF receivers......

Agreed. It is therefore very important to have RF filtering in a device on
the terminals, to prevent any RF from leaking out over wires.

Let's just dump all this NMEA crap from 1970 and build Bluetooth
compatibility into every new marine electronic gadget. No need for
multiplexers for ancient technology mistakes, wires radiating crap to
all the radios, wires picking up the 150 watt SSB transmitter and
trashing all the NMEA crap it's hooked to.

Yes and no. I will have a Bluetooth mulitplexer soon, but the problem with
Bluetooth is that it allows either data over a 'serial profile', which is
a
point to point connection between two devices only (which my BT
multiplexer
will be: mux - PDA or computer) or you can have a piconet, which creates
an RF network with a limit of 8 devices. I wonder though what an average
BT
device does when 150 W of RF is emitted in the near vincinity....
One think is for su BT or any RF datalink is far away from any approval
needed for commercial vessels.

Meindert