Got home tonight and dived into installing the new NMEA2000/Merc monitor that finally breaks down the walls between Smartcraft and NMEA 2000 devices. If you have not followed the Sony “Beta vs VHF” war embarked upon by Merc and the rest of the industry, do some reading, that’s another whole discussion.
Suffice to say after Merc exited the Navman/Northstar fiasco, cooler heads prevailed and they have came out with a gateway/guage “for the rest of us.” (i.e. The other 99% of the elelctronics world.) They are doing it in the form of a black box or a merc gauge that easily replaces the speedo which now adds many new functions to the boat instead of the old SC1000 speedo. I hope many opt for the new speedo.
The box I got from Merc was marked prototype and had a few extra parts but with each monitor you’ll get the gauge, harness, NMEA drop cables and NMEA “T” and terminator plug to expand your N2K current backbone.
Honestly it took me all of 10 min to get up and running with no tools.
1. Remove old smartcraft speedo and harness from junction box
2. Plug in new harness to J box, and in same hole tighten collar for new speedo
3. Connect the NMEA cable on the harness to your backbone, adding a T and end plug.
Now on to the fun stuff. The gauge ,like the old merc monitors can show in 6 diff colors – have not figured out which I like – colors for day and night can be diff. But one thing that’s just clever is you can configure the turn on screen so it has your baot name onit instead of Mercury. Here’s mine:
And how it integrates into the dash –
So I turned on the motors and everything worked immediately. It went thru a “autoconfigure” mode .I had to recalc the fuel capacity and instantly the analog smartcraft gauge came alive using the default method.
And the biggest news of all, no more of that “hook your speedo to your GPS using the blue white wires from your GPS. “ The NMEA cable to the backbone supplies data both ways: engine data to the GPS and GPS data to the speedo – for all your “ fule to waypoint” and digital speed and accurate mpg.
Here’s the Garmin with no tweaking or fiddling:
And here’s where the rubber meets the road. A single gauge supplies ALL data to theGPS for all engines – you just choose single/twin/trip or quad in the gateway setup. It figures out everything else
Favorites are back (and soon to come to vesselview) – so you can choose out of the 35 screens avail WHICH ones you want to see and which ones should go away (generator, waste tank, etc) and then how fast you want them to rotate in seconds.
Finally, There is a new mode called “ECO MODE”. I have not played with it yet and still am waiting for the manual, bur suffice to say you plug in the parameters you want here:
And then you run the boat and it evaluates how economical you’re running. Once I understand this more, I’ll do another write up on it.
So that it. Thanks Merc for the easy set up and finally making everything work together on my dash.
New Merc NMEA 2000 install - First Looks 
he's the best. 
