IEC 61162 marine data interfaces

IEC 61162 is the International Electrotechnical Commission series of standards for digital interfaces between marine navigation and radiocommunication equipment. Its parts cover single-talker multiple-listener serial sentences, high-speed transmission and Ethernet networking on the bridge.

IMO performance standards call it up wherever equipment has to exchange data: the voyage data recorder standard MSC.333(90) requires interfacing to international standards with a footnote to IEC 61162, and the S-VDR standard MSC.163(78) picks up extra data items only where they are available in that format.

The full article will cover the parts of the series and their editions, the sentence structure and talker identifiers, the relationship with the NMEA standards, network security provisions, and how the series is used in type approval of bridge equipment.