Bayboy 1989
New member
Just completed a major Repower/refit on a twin helm Bayliner that I have owned for many years and I have almost muscled my way through all the brain damage caused in getting one’s head around the N2K protocol so issues might still be ‘on me’. Couldn’t get NP 300 controller to recognize the processor when I jumped into sea trial phase, and the system e-message I got was pretty disparaging! However I got a little lucky. I have 30 “T’s” on my backbone with all the ‘stuff’ I felt I ‘needed’. One of the components (devices) is a Bennett Marine ATP trim tab system which is also connected to the can bus. Comes on automatically with ignition switch but sill draws power to retract trim tabs when outboards (ignition) are switched off. I had added a switch to isolate this system, and by chance found that when it was off I could get the NP300 controllers (1 upstairs and one downstairs) to start talking to the processor. Further investigation has revealed that while 27 devices connected to the backbone all have different addresses assigned, the NP processor, one NP controller (the other uses an address of 14) and the Bennett ATP are all sharing the network address “0”. For clarification, is not a instance 0.
So, it appears I have to change addresses and now I am starting to severely challenge my skill set! To this point I have been pretty much self taught. In Colorado we are at best about 1K miles from any dealer that might know anything about this protocol. When you raise N2K you are instantly considered to be talking Greek. Can anyone out there point me in a good direction? Would really like to find a NMEA 101 publication but so far have been unsuccessful. Everything I know which isn’t much, has been gleaned from websites which, for the most part, seems to be vendors trying to sell their products and unfortunately not adequately educational.
So, it appears I have to change addresses and now I am starting to severely challenge my skill set! To this point I have been pretty much self taught. In Colorado we are at best about 1K miles from any dealer that might know anything about this protocol. When you raise N2K you are instantly considered to be talking Greek. Can anyone out there point me in a good direction? Would really like to find a NMEA 101 publication but so far have been unsuccessful. Everything I know which isn’t much, has been gleaned from websites which, for the most part, seems to be vendors trying to sell their products and unfortunately not adequately educational.
