Hello all, first time poster...
To preface, I am an IT guy. I am new to marine electronics, so I can learn quickly but I need some pointers.
I just bought a new yacht w some equipment on it... Two e125 raynaribe mfds, an e127, radar, and a few ray marine cameras.
I need Internet on the boat, so I have selected a cradlepoint 2100 router that allows for two cellular connections (Verizon plus batelco for example) plus wifi over wan to use a marinas wifi connection. Plus it allows use of external antennas and satellites. It's an awesome Swiss army knife unit to use for marine applications.
What I want to do is tie that unit into my seatalk network so that I can join a single wifi network and have access to all devices and the Internet (think ipad copilot, which turns your iPad into an Mfd). To do this, first I need a way to physically connect the ray talk switch into the ethernet switch of the cradlepoint router, although it looks like ray marine makes that has a raytalk end on one side and an ethernet connection on the other. I also need to know if I can converge the raytalk ip network with the ip network of the router, and ultimately, use the dhcp server on the cradlepoint router so connecting devices can find the router to get out to the Internet. This means that I will have to disable the dhcp server on the raytalk switch. Can this be done? Is there an admin page for the seatalk switch? Does it use dhcp? What is the standard subnet it uses? Can that be changed?
if I can't turn off the dhcp server of the raytalk switch, or change the subnet of the raytalk switch, or at the very least put in a gateway option for the raytalk dhcp server, I theoretical could use a Cisco router and NAT to bridge the two networks together, but this is more complicated and "stupid".
So I'm looking for pointers from those here that understand networking and Raytalk.
Thanks In advance, free dumdum suckers for thise who contribute. Ha!
Ryan
Sorry, Ryan, I don't think it's possible. Raymarine says that they'd like to make it possible for their gear to join a boat LAN but it may only be via WiFi and they have not committed to a date. Marine Ethernet networks were all designed to be closed systems and none has broken out so far, except that Navico GoFree is about to.
Ryan, you can achieve your goal but I think you will need an interface device between your networks rather than a direct connection. There are number available, some providing wireless or USB but you should look for an ethernet-capable device. I have a Shipmodul Miniplex 2E connected to my Cradlepoint router and it provides a single network with both internet access and nav data. I primarily use iNavx for my iPad as MFD but several other apps can use the data. The Miniplex interfaces to NMEA 0183, which is fine for the systems I have but you probably want to look for a NMEA 2000-capable interface with ethernet such as Chetco SeaSmart.