NMEA is a marine industry standard for communicating information between on-board devices. Automatic Identification System (AIS) is a standard for exchanging vessel location and other information using VHF radio signals. AIS data is typically shared between on-board devices using NMEA.
SEAiq supports using external NMEA/AIS information over WiFi and (for devices that support it) Bluetooth. SEAiq can also be configured to act as an NMEA server, forwarding own its information to other devices.
With the appropriate configuration settings in SEAiq you can do the following:
Numerous alarms are provided for NMEA data. Among these include an alarm to indicate data corruption. When at least 10 "sentences" and 5% of the total in the prior 5 minutes have checksum errors, an alarm will be presented. These are shown no more frequentl than every 5 minutes.
Important for Apple IOS: If you receive a dialog SEAiq would like to find and connect to devices on your local network, be sure to press OK. The most common issue users have is caused by not allowing this permission. This can be resolved by following these steps .
This section describes how to connect your device to an NMEA data feed over WiFi. Before adjusting these settings, you first ensure your NMEA data feed and this device are connected to the same network.
Inactivity Alarm Reminder : When enabled, a warning is generated when (1) data is received from NMEA and (2) the Inactivity Alarm is disabled. A warning is given asking if you would like to enable the Inactivity Alarm. Pressing Alarm, enables the inactivity alarm. Pressing OK disables this warning for 5 minutes, after which it may fire again.
This also functions similarly for Extra NMEA Connection, if that is enabled.
AIS Alarm : When enabled, alarms reported from AIS are displayed to the user.
AIS alarms normally are generated by the ship's AIS, not a PPU. Unfortunately, the meaning of AIS alarms may vary between ship's AIS systems.
Alarms cause the display to flash with a warning message. After dismissing the alarm, no further AIS alarms are reported for at least 2 minutes.
Regardless of whether alarms are enabled, recent alarms from AIS can be viewed under Settings / NMEA & AIS / Diagnostics.
HDOP Alarm (Only SEAiq Pilot) : When enabled, an alarm is generated if GPS HDOP exceeds 5.0 for 5 reports. HDOP is an abbreviation for Horizontal Dilution of Precision, an estimation of the accuracy of GPS positions. If an alarm occurs, it is disabled for 60 seconds after you acknowledge it.
The requirements for 5 reports is to avoid so-called false positive alerts where one or a few high-HDOP values are reported.
HDOP alarms are not generated when RTK FIX is active.
This alarm requires that an HDOP value is received from NMEA/AIS. Typically, this information is not available from a basic WiFi AIS Pilot Plug. If no HDOP is received, no alarm fires.
Show Device GPS (Only SEAiq Pilot) : When enabled, the device's internal GPS position is displayed along with position from NMEA/AIS. A circle marked INT indicating the radius of Horizontal Position Error is also shown. The position is intended to be used to help validate GPS information reported from NMEA/AIS.
If other GPS positions are available but were not used for display of Own-Ship, they are also shown. Possible other positions include AIS, NMEA (for Primary NMEA), and EXTRA (for Extra NMEA).
NMEA Verification Alarm (Only SEAiq Pilot) : When enabled, an alarm fires if NMEA/AIS and GPS position differ by at least 100m. After acknowledging an alarm, it is disabled for 1 minute.
The alarm incorporates the relative positions of the NMEA and GPS antennas in determining the alarm distance. See Own-Ship settings.
PCA Non-Portable Pilot Unit (Only SEAiq Pilot) : Configure for use with the Panama Canal Authority Non-Portable Pilot Unit (NPPU) specification. All devices compliant with the NPPU specification are supported. Currently available devices include:
Units from other vendors which support the NPPU standard from PCA should also work.
The PCA NPPU standard uses UDP communication on port 17608. The network configuration for NPPUs is the same as Trelleborg CAT ROT (v2-5).
Trelleborg CAT ROT (v2-5) (Only SEAiq Pilot) : Configure for use with following Trelleborg devices:
For CAT II and CAT III, please see documentation for further configuration steps that are required, as well as additional configuration options.
The network configuration received UDP on port 17608 and is the same as PCA NPPU.
Trelleborg CAT ROT+I (v2,v4-5) & CAT XT (v4-5) (Only SEAiq Pilot) : Configure for use with following Trelleborg devices:
Trelleborg CAT ROT+I (v3), CAT XT (v3), CAT MAX (Only SEAiq Pilot) : Configure for use with following Trelleborg devices:
AD Navigation PPUs (Only SEAiq Pilot) : Configure WiFi for use with all recent AD Navigation devices. All recent AD Navigation devices use the same WiFi configuration. Supported device include ADQ-2, ADX DUO, ADX XR, and ADX XR Lite. These all use host 10.33.3.3 and port 8023. The ADX XR2 has a different setting.
Some older devices may have custom settings; please contact your documentation or AD Navigation for your configuration details.
KSNTEK KSN11-W or KSN55 / PilotsTech AW2016 (Only SEAiq Pilot) : Configure for use with certain KSNTEK and PilotsTech devices, including:
These devices use connection type TCP, host 192.168.1.1 and port 8888.
KSNTEK KSN11-C ROT or KSN55-C / PilotsTech AW2016C-ROT (Only SEAiq Pilot) : Configure for use with certain KSNTEK and PilotsTech devices, including:
These devices use connection type TCP, host 192.168.2.1 and port 8888.
Connection Type : Select WiFi or Bluetooth connection to external GPS device.
Bluetooth is not supported on Apple iPads/iPhones.
Connection Type (Only SEAiq Pilot) : Select WiFi or Bluetooth connection for extra GPS device.
Bluetooth is not supported on Apple iPads/iPhones.
Connection Type (Only SEAiq Pilot) : Select WiFi or Bluetooth connection for extra GPS device.
Bluetooth is not supported on Apple iPads/iPhones.
SEAiq supports forwarding GPS information to other devices as a new NMEA feed. This is useful, for instance, if you have an iPhone with GPS and a WiFi-only iPad without GPS. You can install SEAiq on both devices, configure the iPhone as an NMEA server and the iPad as an NMEA client.
In the example above, you first need to make sure both devices are on the same WiFi network. Then get the IP address of the iPhone by going to Settings, WiFi, and selecting the name of the network being used. Then pick a port number to use. Here we use 10000.
The SEAiq NMEA server does not currently forward AIS data, only GPS-related data (location, course, speed, etc).