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Companionway Instruments - Panel Removal

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kenfischer	Companionway Instruments - Panel Removal		Lead	[-]
Posts: 176 09/20/07 12:35:46 Moderator	Tags : None I'm about to start a project of adding Raymarine instruments to the companionway as repeaters to the primary instruments at the helm (so everyone else can see). I'm sure I can get the wire up the to starboard coach roof winch, as there is room there for an electric winch. The question is how to get from there to instruments. There will be a bar mounted the the companionway/hatch cover panel. I'm thinking if I pull that panel, I will find a place to run the wire and then drill through the core from there to the cavity beneath with winch. I definitely do not want to run the wires on the ceiling. Any advice? Any notes on pulling and rebedding the companionway cover panel? As a side note, NavPod (Ocean Equipment) has an abysmal web site and doesn't even mention that there is a four place companionway pod available. I took a guess at what the part number would be and googled it. Sure enough, lots of hits. Bought it through amazon. What instruments are we adding, you may ask? At the helm, we have a C80, tridata, wind, and AP. In the companionway, we are adding speed and depth (individual instruments that came with the boat), plus wind and AP. This will allow us to cruise on autopilot while standing in the companionway, which is common for us in cold weather. Ken Fischer 2005 C42 #906 "Solaria" 3 Cabin Pullman, Fin Keel, Mast Furling Main, 155% Genoa Last Edited By: kenfischer 09/20/07 12:39:17. Edited 2 times.
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pwinterfeld		#1	[url]	[-]
Posts: 110 09/20/07 16:35:28	Hi Ken As a thought - have you looked at the new wireless instruments??? I saw them at the Long Beach Boat Show today - very interesting. Would save a lot of trouble running wires. Peter C'est laVie Hull #746
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sashay567		#2	[url]	[-]
Posts: 200 09/20/07 16:42:35	Ken, I have had my companionway cover off several times. The first was the worst with the usual difficulty in freeing up the cover from the hold of the bedding compound. I used a putty knife to cut through the bedding material. I did not use anything to rebed the cover, electing instead to use dense weather stripping as a gasket. Seems to work OK on our San Franscisco climate... your milage may vary. Once the cover is loose, I removed mine by pulling it up and aft working it under the traveler. My boat has a hard dodger and by going aft, it was able to avoid removing the dodger and avoid interference from the mast and vang. Hope that helps. Rodney Kidd, C-42 #567 Sashay, 2 Cabin Fin, Marina Village, Alameda, CA
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kenfischer		#3	[url]	[-]
Posts: 176 09/20/07 17:26:28 Moderator	Wireless would certainly be great, but we are working with an existing ST60 system. We already had two of the four instruments, and the other two came from eBay. Given the climate here in the PNW, I think we will rebed the cover. Any thoughts on what to use? Thanks for the replies. Ken Fischer 2005 C42 #906 "Solaria" 3 Cabin Pullman, Fin Keel, Mast Furling Main, 155% Genoa
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pwinterfeld		#4	[url]	[-]
Posts: 110 09/21/07 06:13:22	Hi Ken I had my boat in the PNW for more than a year ( '05 -'06 the year it rained for 29 days straight) and the only thing that I used to keep the water out was a foam type seal - had no problem with moisture - although, while the boat was in the slip I used a large trash bag over the instruments. But we sailed in the rain without problems. Peter C'est la Vie Hull #746
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tomca		#5	[url]	[-]
Posts: 80 09/21/07 08:00:01	Ken have you looked in to the wireless remote by raymarine? I purchased one and love it. I can walk the boat, hide under the doger or even go below occasionally and still have control of the boat, view instrument info all in the palm of my hand. I like the idea of having instruments under the doger, but for someone like myself who occasionally removes the doger to race the boat, the wireless remote is the way to go. Tom Maxwell #766 2-cabin Pullman Dana Point, CA
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kenfischer		#6	[url]	[-]
Posts: 176 09/21/07 12:13:52 Moderator	Solaria is a charter boat, so that changes the rules a bit. "Wireless" items have a tendancy to be "In-the-drink-ish" items. So, we are going with a very clean integrated system, where everything is bolted in place. Ken Fischer 2005 C42 #906 "Solaria" 3 Cabin Pullman, Fin Keel, Mast Furling Main, 155% Genoa
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do335		#7	[url]	[-]
Posts: 257 09/21/07 18:03:53	I have some ideas you may consider instead of multiple instruments. I had an older Standard Horizon C150 chartplotter and mounted it over the companionway. If you go to the menu on the 150, you can have it display all of the NMEA 1083 messages like speed, depth, wind spd, lots. It will display from one to eight values. With this you only need the one. Another option is the Raymarine ST60 Multi Display. It can display any four instruments on one regular ST60 size instrument case. Steve 642-2f TESA
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svzephyr44		#8	[url]	[-]
Posts: 116 09/25/07 04:52:52	I have the Tacktick wireless insturments - My ST50 instruments were dying and I needed to replace them. I thought that Raymarine was overpriced and their repair support lacking (e.g. they refuse to repair ST50 instruments and will not provide replacement parts to their service vendors.) What I liked about the Tacktick's was: 1. They are 100% wireless - no transducer cable, no power cable to the displays. They can be mounted anywhere without concern for running any wires. 2. They mount flush in a snap-out bracket. I can move them from one place on the boat to another simply by popping them out of the bracket and moving them to a second bracket. For example, when we race we can put the instruments where they are easily seen by the trimmers, when we cruise I can carry them down below and have a full insturment readout in the salon. 3. With the exception of the analog wind instrument the two readouts (single line and double line) are ubiqutious. There is no depth or speed or cross track error or whatever gauge - each instrument is all of those things all of the time - you just page thru the various chapters and pages to get the specific readout you want on the particular instrument at that point in time. 4. The "fob" instrument is great. I put the wrist band on and carry it all over the boat. I have access to every readout in real time no matter where I am, on the foredeck, in the head, in the cockpit. Like the single and double line instruments I can get every chapter and page in either a single line or a four line display. 5. I like the "wind shift" page a lot. When racing early knowlege that the wind is shifting is critical to success. Having a readout that tells me that the wind is not longer coming from the same direction is a nice plus. Last Edited By: svzephyr44 09/25/07 15:06:15. Edited 1 time.
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bimmerboy750		#9	[url]	[-]
Posts: 55 09/25/07 06:33:29	Are the micronet transmitters compatible with existing AIRMAR (raymarine) transducers used in existing ST50 setups? The ducers on tacktick's web site look very familiar. I'd like to replace my ST-50 tridata, and maybe continue to use my existing ducers. Rick Pain Killer
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svzephyr44		#10	[url]	[-]
Posts: 116 09/25/07 15:04:17	The Tacktick instruments come with their own transducers. The Depth and Speed transducers are combined into a tri-ducer. You might get lucky and find that the tri-ducer fits in the same sleeve as the ST-50 speed transducer. That way you can leave the depth transducer in place and not have to drill or fill any holes in the hull. There are two separate "brain boxes" for the Tacktick's. One "brain box" - the "T-121 hull transmitter" - takes a wire feed from the compass and triducer and broadcasts the wireless signal for the instruments. It requires 12 volt power. The wind transducer is also wireless (no wire down the mast) as it talks to the brain box via wireless and like the display instruments is solar powered. Note that at this point we have a closed system - the Tacktick instruments are talking to each other but are not talking to anything else. Interfacing the Tacktick data with the rest of the data requires the second "brain box." It is the "T-122 wireless interface." This box also requires 12 volt power and has two NMEA In interfaces and one NMEA Out interface. It also has a provision for an alarm circuit. This would be the box required to interface with the ST-50 instrument data. However, the ST-50 instruments only talk SeaTalk. So you need a way to get from SeaTalk to NMEA and NMEA to SeaTalk. Now if you have a recent Autohelm autopilot computer you will find that in addition to the SeaTalk ports there are two NMEA ports (both In and Out.) So you would think it would be an easy thing to hook the autopilot computer "NMEA In" to the TackTick "NMEA Out" and vice versa. HOWEVER, IN THEIR INFINITE WISDOM Raymarine made sure it didn't work that way to force you to spend more money! First, the NMEA "1" connection on the autopilot computer only talks "autopilot" so it is totally useless. NMEA "2" talks a lot of sentences but of course speed, depth, and wind are not included in the outputs. To actually get speed, depth and wind from SeaTalk to NMEA requires yet another box from Raymarine, the PC/Seatalk/NMEA Interface box. This box at least seems to pass all of the standard NMEA sentences. So the summary to your question would be - the one time cost to set up the Tacktick instruments and interface them to whatever remains of your Autohelm instruments is not cheap. The Tacktick "Racer's Edge Kit" of three readouts (Single Line, Dual Line, Analog Wind) plus the triducer, wind transducer, and the hull transmitter) retails for about $3,500. If you purchase the Tacktick "Super Sailing System" which includes the NMEA interface brain box but drops the single line display you are going to pay about $2,700 retail. Add about $125 for the Raymarine PC/Seatalk/NMEA Interface box and you can see it is quite a bit of money. Now on the other hand if you believe you need to replace you ST-50 wind, close hauled wind, depth and speed (the position I was in) new Raymarine instruments would be in the same ball park. Let me digress with a couple of points: 1) The more I work with NMEA the more I discover that what goes into NMEA "In" does not necessarly come out of NEMA "Out." One needs to read the product documentation to see what sentences are actually passed thru any device. This seems to me to be a major flaw in the specification - a device should not be able to "strip off" some of the input data that it is repeating on the output port. 2) There is quite a potential for redundant information and I have not sorted out what that means. For example, the autopilot computer has an input for the fluxgate compass. The Tacktick instruments also have their own fluxgate. At the moment I have both hooked up. I am not sure, given "1" above if I could safely disconnect one or the other. Another example is GPS data. I have a Raymarine GPS that feeds onto the SeaTalk bus that goes thru the PC/Seatalk/Computer Interface and shows up on my laptop as COM10. I also have a little Garmin GPS that I feed into my computer COM12 port. The Nobeltec "Admiral" program sees both and will switch back and forth if one or the other loses it's fix. It also repeats the GPS data on the COM10 port. This ultimately gets fed back on the SeaTalk bus, so when the Raymarine GPS loses it's fix the SeaTalk bus is using the Garmin GPS data. I could choose to feed the Garmin data directly into the TackTick wireless interface. One presumes this will then get put out on the TackTick NMEA output, go thru the Raymarine PC/Seatalk/Computer Interface and end up both on the Seatalk bus and the NMEA input to my computer for the Admiral. I am unsure of the advantages and disadvantages of each potential wiring scheme. I could of course simply remove the Raymarine GPS but it is convenient to have it at the helm station - I have a couple of "Go Home" routes programmed, and I do like the fact that there is a pretty simple MOB entry. 3) Of course we now have NMEA 2000. None of the above are NMEA 2000 but rather the older NMEA specification. I could not find any reason to go to NMEA 2000 equipment at this point, but time will tell if that was the correct decision Roger Reboot #493 Roger REBOOT USA 60493
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