I am looking forward to trying the TSIP binary protocol as it is far more flexible and useful for troubleshooting.

can you attach to it with minicom/hyperterminal and parse it? I can't.

I always hated trying to debug Rockwell binary protocol, I don't see why this would be easier, though if you parse it all you get more information, probably.

NMEA parsers are "hard" because what can be spewed at you isn't tightly controlled enough, but with fine-tuning NMEA is easily more friendly to a person trying to figure out what's going on than a binary protocol you have to pray you wrote the correct reader for.