Vesper cortex/Raymarine E80

[Bmorgan562]

Im looking/hoping to keep my Raymarine E80 as there's nothing "wrong" with it. If im reading it correctly the Vesper cortex will connect with it using NMEA2000 FEMALE TO SEATALK NG CABLE OPTION.... Does anyone have any experience with this? Does it work?work well? Thank you in advance.

[smac999]

the E80 needs ais via nmea 183. not sure the newer vesper has 183 out. all the older ones do. you will need the 183 cable for the E80, which may be hard to find if you don't already have it. if you have it because it's already in use for a vhf or pilot ect, that connecton will have to be removed in order to use AIS. so you'd have to pick one or the other.

you also need the newer software in the E80 in order to show AIS. which if you are lucky arelady have, as the the CF cards needed are hard to find.

[CarlF]

The Cortex does support 0183 connections to chartplotters. Given that the E80 comes from the era when Raymarine didn’t fully support NMEA 2000, I think 0183 is more likely to succeed. Remember you’ll have to set the baud rate.

[AedanC]

I connected a friends E80 with a Vesper XB8000. He contacted Raymarine support and they said that NMEA2000 doesn’t work for AIS on the E80. I connected up NMEA0183 and it worked fine.

As the previous person said E80 does have to be upgraded to the latest version in order to support AIS. The new version can be downloaded but you need to find a very, very small CF card to put it on. I’m afraid I can’t remember how small.

[Bmorgan562]

Originally Posted by AedanC

I connected a friends E80 with a Vesper XB8000. He contacted Raymarine support and they said that NMEA2000 doesn’t work for AIS on the E80. I connected up NMEA0183 and it worked fine.

As the previous person said E80 does have to be upgraded to the latest version in order to support AIS. The new version can be downloaded but you need to find a very, very small CF card to put it on. I’m afraid I can’t remember how small.

Thank you so much. I really appreciate the input and good news !!

[AedanC]

Originally Posted by Bmorgan562

Thank you so much. I really appreciate the input and good news !!

You are welcome. I also just remembered that the CF card had to be formatted to some now obsolete file format. An old computer had to be used for that.


If I remember any more I'll post it here.

[AedanC]

I took a quick look through my mail archive from 2017 and found out the following:


1 My friends' plotter was a C80 not an E80, sorry. I'm not sure but was the only difference the screen size?



2 A 128MB (note MB not GB) CF card would not work. A 16MB did.


3 The CF card had to be formatted to FAT16, not the now common FAT32.


Hopefully your plotter is already at the latest firmware and thus you won't need all this.


Good luck!


Aedan

[smac999]

95% of the E /C series I see are new enough to take ais. I rarly have to update them to add ais.

The last update was over 10 years ago. So it’s not like it had to be done recently.

You can ckevk the software version on the screen.