So nothing goes off perfectly and this electronics installation is no different. This past weekend we found a couple of glitches, mostly to do with my skill at assembling “Field Installable” NMEA 2000 connectors. These are a necessary evil unless you want to drill giant holes all over your boat to accommodate the huge connector heads even the smaller cables have.
Running cables has probably been the most time consuming part of the project. If you don’t want the inside of your boat looking like one of these places you need to spend some time removing ceiling and floor panels, cabinetry, furniture, etc. and snaking cables through the hidden areas of the boat. It looks nice if you do it right and awful if you do it wrong. Of course of your cables attach to things that go outside the boat you actually need to worry about water leaks too…but I digress.
This weekend we saw a little oddness with the NMEA data that was displayed. When one of the displays showed our “Speed Over Ground” at 199 knots I figured something might be up. Using the Maretron N2K Analyzer (I figured I’d need this expensive thing so I bought it pre-emptively…I was right) I was able to isolate the problem to a poorly made Micro Cable connector I had on the GPS. That seemed to sort it out.
There are still other integration issues to resolve – for example the Multi Function Displays are still not reliably showing course information to the other display units and there are still the occasional lockups on the MFD’s (these may be related to my babbling N2K Cable…) but overall it is working smoothly.
I’ve still got a long punch down list and the entire autopilot installation to complete but as it stands now we’ve got a good solid functioning core set of gear.
