The Packetlogger suite allows you to see all packets on the NMEA 2000 bus once you hook your computer up to the bus. It is available as a free download under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

The software has been developed for private use and is released here for individuals who want to explore the NMEA 2000 protocol and experiment with the data in more detail than possible with ‘closed source’ commercial solutions.

The licensing form implies that you can use the material in your own research, but that releasing commercial products based on my work is not allowed.

Packetlogger allows you to view and analyze the PGNs that it understands. The list of PGNs is available here:

Textfile of PGNs understood

XML file of PGNs understood

Using the software utilities

See our blog page for examples.

Software Requirements

The download includes binaries for Microsoft Windows, Linux x86, Linux x86_64, Linux arm-gnueabi and 64 bit Mac OS X.

As of November 2011 the Windows release is based on Cygwin instead of MSVC. As of April 2012 the Actisense DLL is no longer used and the Windows code uses the same code base as the UNIX versions. Long live Cygwin!

The Linux version requires libc.so.6 to be installed on your system. Recent Debian, Ubuntu and other distributions should all be OK.

The Mac OS X version was compiled on 10.7 (Lion) but should run on 10.5 as well. Note that I have had limited success talking to the serial ports on OS X. The analyzer itself works fine.

Hardware Requirements

Packetlogger requires either a CANUSB or Actisense NGT-1 interface. We recommend the Actisense NGT-1 as it is opto-coupled and is supported by other commercial software.

Device List

The packetlogger has been tested with the following equipment:

    Airmar PB200

    Airmar DST200/DST800/DT800

    Garmin GPSMAP 5000

    Lowrance EP-65R

    Lowrance EP-80R

    Lowrance HDS

    Maretron GPS100

    Maretron DSM250

    Maretron SCC200

    Maretron RAA100

    Maretron WSO100

    Mastervolt NMEA2000 interface

    Navico NAIS-300

    Raymarine AIS 500

    Raymarine E-80

    Raymarine E140W

    Simrad AC42

    Simrad AP24

    Simrad AT10

    Simrad IS20

    Simrad RC42

    Simrad RS82

    Simrad WR20

Release history

2012.04.15 - Removed Actisense.dll use & moved to UNIX code base

2012.05.03 - Licensed under CC BY-NC-SA

2011.11.28 - Various PGN fixups

2010.10.06 - Complete PGN field lengths for many PGNs, initial Darwin binaries, sign added in XML, signed binary fields decoded

2010.09.14 - Small PGN fixups

2010.09.13 - Small PGN fixups

2010.09.07 - Complete PGN list, Linux x86 binaries, many field changes

2009.10.15 - Added support for Airmar PB200 & more PGNs

2009.08.06 - Bugfixes, PGNs, export of PGN format in XML

2009.06.28 - Added support for Actisense NGT-1

2009.06.21 - Added support AIS class B PGNs

2009.06.07 - More PGNs

2009.06.02 - Initial version