The National Marine Electronics Association (NMEA) is an industry organization that has developed a standard protocol for communication between marine electronics devices. This protocol is used to enable data sharing between devices such as GPS receivers, chartplotters, fishfinders, and radar systems.
To read GPS data, the NMEA protocol uses a series of standard sentences which are transmitted from the GPS receiver to other devices. These sentences provide information on a range of data including latitude, longitude, speed, course, and other important navigational information.
The NMEA protocol uses a standard communication format which consists of ASCII characters. This makes it easy for devices to communicate with each other because the message format is uniform and consistent.
To ensure that devices are able to communicate with each other, the NMEA protocol also includes a set of guidelines for data formatting, transmission rates, and error detection. This helps to prevent errors and ensure that data is transmitted accurately between devices.
