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You cannot just plug two NMEA 2000 devices together with a suitable NMEA 2000 cable – they must be connected to a properly constructed NMEA 2000 network. Each device has an NMEA 2000 interface that must be powered from the network Some smaller low power devices, like sensors are also powered from the network There is a small cost in setting up the network, but future expansion is very easy An NMEA 2000 Starter Kit is a cost effective way to build a small, expandable networkRead More →

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If you have an old or spare NMEA 2000 cable kicking around in your “come in handy” box, then put it to good use and create your own NMEA 2000 Test Lead. Assuming your cable is a Male to Female cable, you can actually create two test leads from the same cable, by simply cutting it in half, stripping back the outer insulation and fitting the five wires inside (Red/White/Blue/Black/Shield) to a piece of terminal “chocolate” block – as shown below. The Male Test Lead will actually be the most useful, as the majority of “back bone” connections are female, so you will be ableRead More →

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Hi Paul, We started developing iKommunicate back in 2015 and it was the first commercial product to support Signal K. Digital Yacht also helped with the final push to release Signal K V1.00, actively working on the specification, branding and website development. Unfortunately, this level of involvement was unsustainable and when one of our iKommunicate Engineers retired and another went off to start his own business, we had to “freeze” further development. iKommunicate is still a good gateway product and for many people who just want a unit that works but do not want the latest cutting edge functionality, it is a good choice. ItRead More →

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A flashing RED Status LED indicates a high VSWR reading or potentially a Power Amplifier fault. For the flashing RED Status LED issue, with the 12v power turned off to the AIS Transponder, I would visually inspect the BNC antenna connector on the AIS and make sure there are no signs of connector damage. Then connect up whichever VHF antenna you have the most confidence in. Now power ON the AIS Transponder and immediately join its wireless network and bring up the web interface before the unit has got a GPS position fix and tried to transmit or use ProAIS2 if your AIS transponder don’tRead More →

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In general, unless indicated differently by the MFD manufacturer (Navico/Garmin/Raymarine/Furuno), it is best to leave the manufacturer’s wired Ethernet network, just for connecting the manufacturer’s equipment together and if you want to provide the system with an internet connection, to do this by connecting the master MFD wirelessly to our 4GXtream. This will result in having two wired Ethernet networks on the boat, one for the navigation equipment and the other for internet access and normal IT type networking, but it will result in the most reliable operation of the two networks. Most MFD manufacturers do not want customers to open up their Ethernet networkRead More →

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This is pretty normal behaviour for a modern GNSS receiver and is a result of position “jitter” caused by multi-path signals and scintillation. Traditionally, older GPS systems used to apply a low pass filter (damping) to the calculated positions and this reduced the SOG and COG fluctuations when stationary. With the GPS160 and its highly accurate Tri-Data technology, we decided to not apply any damping so that the readings were as accurate and with as little lag as possible. The only down side of this approach is this 0.1 Knot indication when stationary, but as soon as you start moving you get the most accurateRead More →

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The flashing Red Error LED indicates that your NAVLink2 has quite an early version of firmware. As you can imagine, there are loads of different NMEA 2000 devices installed on boats, of varying age and firmware versions and since we released NAVLink2, we have come across quite a few “odd situations” where unexpected combinations of data have caused our “software watchdog” to detect an issue and restart the NAVLink2. In each of these cases, we have had to release a firmware update for the NAVLink2, to fix the issue. We can update your unit to the very latest version (V2.70) for you free of charge,Read More →

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It turns out that this ‘modem not responding’ error is caused by the RX connections not being terminated correctly and the floating signals can then trigger this modem error…. Any unused ports need to be terminated (this only applies if you’re using the 14-way or 18-way cables). The ports can be terminated by adding 120 ohm resistors between the RXA and RXB wires, as per the recommendation in the user manual, or by installing the optional junction box. If the error is not resolved by following the above, please contact us again.  Read More →

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You will basically be plugging the Star Link in to the WAN socket of the 4GXtream and then using the web interface to switch between the wired WAN interface (Star Link) and the 4G Mobile interface. There is a “Failover” mode in the 4GXtream where you can tell it to use the Wired WAN by default and then switch to mobile if there is no internet connection on the wired WAN interface (Star Link). This article online tells you how to bypass the Star Link router and will be applicable for our 4GXtream… https://www.starlinkhardware.com/how-to-bypass-the-starlink-router  Read More →

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Although the approach you are taking with DDNS and Port Forwarding would work well on a conventional land based network, that is connected to the internet via a Cable/ADSL router, there are several reasons why they may not work on a mobile network: NAT (Network Address Translation): Mobile networks, especially those using IPv4, typically employ NAT to conserve IP addresses. NAT allows multiple devices to share a single public IP address. When you connect a device to a mobile network, it is assigned a private IP address that is not directly accessible from the internet. This makes it challenging for DDNS and port forwarding toRead More →