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This is the problem with marine electronics - general lack of interoperability... even from one product to another within a company's line.
NMEA 0183 was supposed to allow all electronics to talk and listen, but the standard did not really take hold and the wiring was a pain. Then the offered NMEA 2000 which is a more sophisticated "daisy chain" approach to the network and that is having it's birth and growing pains. There is no industry standard connector for starters and that puts the kabosh on interoperability between brands unless you use 3rd party interface boxes.
And then of course some data is not on NMEA 2000, like radar. The NASA class C AIS I had worked on NMEA 0183 at 38,400 baud and the other instruments at the slower 4,000 and the ray could only deal with one baud rate so I needed a Brookhouse MUX and a Ray data interface 8501 which sorted things out. YIKES this was a rat's nest of wires and hell to figure out.
Here is a photo of my NMEA 0183 wiring. It connects an AIS, Ray C80, Sailcomp AC103, Horizon CP170 and Icom VHF and a rarely used Yeoman. The device at the lower left is a fuse block for the nav instuments. What a project... but it does work.
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