Just bought a Icom M424 vhf for the boat and want to connect my Raymarine A70 to it, get the MMSI number, and have the DSC functioning. Looked up the NMEA 0183 interface connection procedures and now I feel more dumb than before I looked it up (and that’s really bad). All that crap is greek to me. Is there anyone that can explain this procedure in laymans terms, ex: connect the red wire from the GPS to the yellow wire of the radio, instead of ex: the talker interface AO83 connection to the listener output…blah, blah, blah! I’m not good at this electronics stuff. Maybe I just need to take it somewhere!?
Send the Icom back and get a Standard Horizon GX 1700! The SH has the GPS built into it and then you’ll have 2 GPS’s and you don’t have to mess with the wiring! The GX will do everything the Icom will and cost a lot less!
Better read real careful!! Some of those wires may be the type that have shielding inside them. The shielding will be a ground(-) and the inner wire will be the plus (+). If you have that, it’s another can of worms!
Haven’t really looked at the wiring yet, but yeah if I start running into coax type wires I’ll probably have to take it somewhere. Going to try and tackle it tomorrow, so got my fingers crossed it’s as simple as Larry said.
Guess I panicked when I tried to read how to connect. Once I got in there and checked out the wiring. Amazing. The wires all matched color. White, green, yellow, brown. Works fine. Decided to use the supplied 10A fuse with the radio to connect the chartplotter direct to the battery. Tired of every time I shut the engine down and restart the fish finder resetting. Just waiting for the MMSI# now. Good to go. thanks for the input.
Glad you got it hooked up. I just did mine. Hoping it is hooked up correctly. Is there someway to test the vhf gps connection to know if it is working and what is MMSI#
Read you radio book! It should display your GPS location. Remember, your radio and GPS need to be speaking the same sentence language! You can’t have one unit set on NMEA 2000 and the other speaking NMEA 0183.
Glad you got it hooked up. I just did mine. Hoping it is hooked up correctly. Is there someway to test the vhf gps connection to know if it is working and what is MMSI#
You need that MMSI# if your radio has DSC-Digital Service Calling. You get that from BoatUS. They’re the authorized distributor for it, I guess. It’s basically a phone# for your boat.
Yeah, they are small wires, real small!
See, nothing to it. 3 wires 
