Cheap AIS for Raymarine E80

[boats33]

I am planning the installation of a Smart Radio SR161 AIS receiver from MillTech Marine, along with an MiniPlex-AIS multiplexer from ShipModul Marine Electronics to feed my Raymarine E80 Chartplotter.

Advice is needed.

I already have a Raymarine Pathfinder Smart Heading Sensor and a Raymarine Raystar 125 GPS Sensor feeding NMEA 0183 data to the E80 through an existing Raymarine NMEA multiplexer. I want to remove the Raymarine multiplexer and replace it with the MiniPlex-AIS multiplexer, while retaining all of the former capabilities of the system (RADAR overlaying chart) and adding AIS information on the chartplotter.

Suggestions for doing this correctly are welcome

Boats33

[purdue512]

Originally Posted by boats33

I am planning the installation of a Smart Radio SR161 AIS receiver from MillTech Marine, along with an MiniPlex-AIS multiplexer from ShipModul Marine Electronics to feed my Raymarine E80 Chartplotter.

Advice is needed.

I already have a Raymarine Pathfinder Smart Heading Sensor and a Raymarine Raystar 125 GPS Sensor feeding NMEA 0183 data to the E80 through an existing Raymarine NMEA multiplexer. I want to remove the Raymarine multiplexer and replace it with the MiniPlex-AIS multiplexer, while retaining all of the former capabilities of the system (RADAR overlaying chart) and adding AIS information on the chartplotter.

Suggestions for doing this correctly are welcome

Boats33

If it's working, why mess with it? It seems like it could only ask for trouble..

[Terrylh]

Using an AIS receiver with an E120 I found that on the open sea (no ships in AIS range) the damned thing kept on sounding an alarm - I believe that it thinks that the receiver is broken because there is no signal coming into the plotter, and so sounds an alarm which you have to cancel every 15 minutes or so. I have heard that Raymarine were aware of that problem and MAY have a fix. Anyone any ideas ??

[Sandero]

I am using a NASA black box with a C80 and it seems to work. But how do you know if you are missing signals?

At the price it was an interesting intro to AIS but AIS has a ways to go before you can rely on it in any sense. It's a bit more of information to help you.

I suspect things will change (for the better) in the next several years.

[scotte]

Originally Posted by Terrylh

Using an AIS receiver with an E120 I found that on the open sea (no ships in AIS range) the damned thing kept on sounding an alarm - I believe that it thinks that the receiver is broken because there is no signal coming into the plotter, and so sounds an alarm which you have to cancel every 15 minutes or so. I have heard that Raymarine were aware of that problem and MAY have a fix. Anyone any ideas ??

This seems to be a common complaint and problem, especially on units that don't have a way to disable that particular alarm. Makes me wonder how well they test some of this stuff! I don't know if this is a deficiency in the AIS data stream (i.e. the protocol doesn't have an all-is-working-but-no-ships sentence), or a bad assumption in the Raymarine firmware that no data means it must be broken.