NMEA 0183 is a combined electrical and data specification for communication between marine electronics such as echo sounder, sonars, anemometer, gyrocompass, autopilot, GPS receivers and many other types of instruments.
The NMEA 0183 standard uses a simple ASCII, serial communications protocol that defines how data are transmitted in a "sentence" from one "talker" to multiple "listeners" at a time.
Through the use of intermediate expanders, a talker can have a unidirectional conversation with a nearly unlimited number of listeners, and using multiplexers, multiple sensors can talk to a single computer port.
Most GPS manufacturers include special messages in addition to the standard NMEA set in their products for maintenance and diagnostics purposes.
[15] On November 27, 2018, it was issued an update to version 4.11, which supports Global Navigation Satellite Systems other than GPS.