Standard Horizon 1850 Position issues

[JSamford]

I have recently upgraded my boat by replacing two VHF radios with Standard Horizon 1850's and replacing old Furuno chart plotters with Garmin. The system now has a NMEA 2000 network for the Garmin, AIS transceiver, and other displays.
We were unable to get the VHF's to receive and display GPS position from the NMEA 2000 network. Sometimes it would come on for awhile but usually after turning everything on we got annoying alarms from both VHF's that they were not receiving position information. We were told that the VHF's needed some kind of identification of where the GPS location was coming from.
Anyway, my electronics guy was able to solve the problem by connecting the two VHF's to part of the old NMEA 0183 network. But I would like to find out if others have this issue with Standard Horizon 1850 and a NMEA 2000 network.

[mattyb202]

I've been fighting with a similar setup for a while. In my case the NMEA network is probably overkill, as I only have the Garmin 64 and SH 1850 connected. I just went through with a multimeter and all the cables seem to connect properly, but the devices still refuse to see each other. Wishing I'd just gotten the radio with GPS built-in, but was looking forward to the DSC and AIS positions showing up on the Garmin. Maybe I'll try NMEA 0183 next.

[mattyb202]

Standard Horizon support insisted that there are no known incompatibilities, but suggested changing the device number on the 1850 to something higher than the number of devices on the network, like `009`. That does sound like it could be a solution for the JSamford with two VHFs, but it didn't fix my issue. I ended up wiring up the NMEA 0183 network and finally got a position on the VHF.