Digital Yacht has unveiled a smarter NavLink3 WiFi gateway that now logs your voyages and shows live instrument data on any phone or tablet. Alongside it come two bright 1,000-nit S-Series touchscreens. Here’s what’s new and why it matters on board.
You can see both on Digital Yacht’s stand 1:535 at METSTRADE in Amsterdam from 17 to 19 November.
NavLink3: a WiFi gateway that logs and shows your data
NavLink3 is the new version of Digital Yacht’s NavLink NMEA 2000-to-WiFi server, which many owners already use with NavLink2 to feed apps such as Navionics, TimeZero or qtVlm. Like its predecessor, it takes power from the NMEA 2000 backbone and either creates its own WiFi hotspot or joins the boat’s existing network.
However, Digital Yacht has added three things owners will notice:
- Built-in instrument display. A new web interface shows wind, engine, battery and other data on customisable dashboard pages, so a phone or tablet becomes a repeater without a separate app.
- Voyage data logger. The unit records NMEA 2000 data automatically during a trip. You can then add voyage details and export the log for analysis.
- More flexible data feeds. It supports several TCP/IP and UDP streams that you configure independently, and it passes NMEA 2000 alerts on to connected systems.
That logger is the interesting part for us, because it turns a simple gateway into a black box for performance and fault-finding.
S-Series displays: S135 and S185
The S-Series monitors come in two sizes: the 13.3-inch S135 and the 18.5-inch S185. Both use Full HD (1920 × 1080) panels rated at 1,000 nits, with optical bonding, anti-glare treatment and a glove-friendly capacitive multi-touch screen. Digital Yacht rates the front panels IP65 when you install them correctly.
Digital Yacht pitches them at PC-based navigation, for example with its own Aqua Compact PCs or another Windows marine computer. They take HDMI, VGA and composite video, so you can also feed a camera. They run on 12 or 24 V DC and mount in landscape or portrait.
The rest of the METS line-up
Digital Yacht will show six new products in all at the show. Meanwhile, the line-up also includes AllSense, an analogue-to-NMEA 2000 interface with eight sensor inputs, a shunt input and a tacho input, plus NjordLink+ with the Njord Cloud remote-monitoring platform. You can read our earlier coverage of NAVDoctor Pro and SafeLi, and of qtVlm reading raw NMEA 2000 via NavLink.
What it means for owners
So far, Digital Yacht has not published prices, release dates or product pages for NavLink3 or the S-Series. If you are about to buy a NavLink2, it may pay to wait a few weeks and see what NavLink3 costs. We will update this story once the product pages go live.
Source: Digital Yacht METSTRADE 2026 announcement and new products presentation (PDF)
