Awesome weekend and some upgrades

[Tim R.]

We had a great weekend here in Maine. Sailed everywhere and the weather was perfect. Good food, good drink and good friends.

Installed my new Garmin instruments and the NMEA 2000 bus. What a nice system. Just plug and play. Makes NMEA 0183 look archaic. Unfortunately my CP is 0183 so I will have some manual interfacing to do.

But now that my 2000 backbone is installed I can add many differenet sensors and display the data to my Garmin MFDs. Only issue I had were some errors in the Garmin docs but easy enough to figure out.

Next is the long weekend and our first lobster bake of the season. And to install my new AP!

 

[Bad Obsession]

I am still fighting with my Autopilot interfacing with my GPS Map 441s. I have a Raymarine S1 autopilot. I have the black wire and the other wire of the GPS going to the NEMA 0183 input in the Autopilot control head. The autopilot won't follow the GPS course but it will show off course when I try to get it to follow the GPS course and it beeps.

NEMA 0183 is very frustrating.

 

[Tim R.]

Discovered something interesting but rather obvious about NMEA 2000. You do not need drop cables to connect devices.

My instrument housing is pretty tight and the faceplate slides in from the side which make cabling a bit of a challenge. So I connect edthe T connectors directly to my instruments and used some 1 ft. Backbone/drop Cables to connect the Ts. It is much neater now.