NMEA Technologies, Sensors & Gateways for Marine & Maritime Electronics

Actisense is a specialist developer of interfacing electronics, NMEA technologies, sensors and gateways for marine and maritime electronics. Our products give mariners greater control over their vessels’ network data, enabling easy conversion, digitising and sharing, and ensuring that every voyage takes place with the utmost in safety and efficiency.

Our ultra-reliable intelligent devices and interfaces can be easily installed within any NMEA 2000 or NMEA 0183 boat network, and have earned Actisense a variety of industry accolades including:

• Navigation and Communication Award at the European Commercial Marine Awards 2024
• Highly Commended Marine Tech at the Tech South West Awards 2023
• NMEA Manufacturer of the Year 2023 & 2022

Our Products

Our products have been developed with unparalleled knowledge and understanding of the NMEA standards, and are expertly designed to help solve key connectivity and diagnostic challenges with onboard marine electronics.

The product range covers three main functions – Convert, Digitise, and Share.

Convert

Effortlessly convert between NMEA 0183 and NMEA 2000 formats

The original NMEA 0183 standard allows only one device to talk at a time, and offers no data or hardware management. The newer CAN-based NMEA 2000 standard provides a number of significant advantages over serial-based NMEA 0183, including plug-and-play integration, simpler wiring, enhanced data transfer rates, and the ability for multiple devices to communicate bi-directionally over a single bus.

We provide a number of solutions that seamlessly convert NMEA 0183 data into NMEA 2000 data and vice versa. This allows you to utilize legacy devices on a newer network, and enables you to save on equipment costs by doing away with the need to upgrade all your hardware at once. With these products, NMEA 0183 devices can receive vital NMEA 2000 data, and multiple NMEA 0183 signals can be multiplexed together in order to prioritize and consolidate data.

Digitise

Transform analogue signals into NMEA messages

A wide variety of common marine equipment utilizes analogue signals to measure environmental parameters and to gather and output data. This includes transducers in devices that report critical readings such as depth, temperature and speed, as well as a range of different sensors that monitor vital engine information such as temperature, RPM and fluid levels.

Our digitisation products convert these analogue signals into digital NMEA messages that can be transmitted over vessel networks and monitored via NMEA displays, allowing you to gain more control and flexibility over your data without the need to upgrade to expensive digital transducers.

Share

Transmit vital NMEA data across your vessel’s network

Our marine networking solutions enable you to easily build NMEA 2000 networks that can seamlessly integrate a variety of devices on board your vessel, such as GPS receivers, depth sounders, weather stations, and chart plotters. The product range also includes hardware that allows you to overcome the limitations of older NMEA 0183 devices. This includes:

• Buffers: distribute data from one or two “talker” devices to a greater number of connected “listeners”, removing issues with current drive and wiring, and ensuring reliable data distribution. An example of this is sending the data from one GPS receiver to multiple displays.
• Multiplexers: collate data from multiple input devices (e.g. GPS, AIS, weather sensors) into a single stream and output it to a smaller number of output devices such as displays.

Our networking products also enable NMEA data to be streamed via Ethernet and Wi-Fi, providing higher data transfer speeds and enhanced reliability and scalability.