Mystery solved…

After a lot of correspondence, telephone calls and hours in the boat, in front of the laptop, decoding NMEA0183 sentences (did I really need to know all this stuff??), the mystery is finally solved…

It appears that the chartplotter firmware is the culprit. If Navbus is enabled on the chartplotter, it will only accept wind data from Navbus, not the NMEA0183 input. Disable Navbus, and the wind data is displayed!

It seems like a quick fix, but it comes at a price. The biggest issue is that DSC capability (i.e. automatic communication with the VHF to receive and transmit DSC messages) is lost. Also, the barometric pressure and air temperature data sensed by the VHF is now not available at the helm… Navman’s John Dusting said that he would request a firmware update to solve this issue, but it could be a while…