«NMEA 0183 (or NMEA for short) is a combined electrical and data specification for communication between marine electronic devices such as depth finders, navigation instruments, and GPS receivers. It has been defined by, and is controlled by, the US based National Marine Electronics Association. It is also commonly used for GPS receivers other than on board boats. ~ The NMEA 0183 standard uses a simple ASCII, serial communications protocol that defines how data is transmitted in a "sentence" from one "talker" to one or more "listeners". The standard also defines the contents of each sentence (message) type so that all listeners can parse messages accurately.»