Cutting a Radar Cable

[Charlie]

I am going to be pulling my mast in the next few months. I have a Furuno 1821 MKII radar and will have to disconnect the cable. The PO had installed a plug on the cable and it worked fine. Right before I was leaving on the Baja HA HA last year the radar stopped working and it was the cable. Rather then try and track down the problem I replaced the cable and it now works fine. I had to run the new cable up the mast and it was a bit of a pain. In order to take the radar down now I would like to splice the wires to a block rather then pull the cable down the mast. Is this a good idea or not?

[imagine2frolic]

This interesting, because I was thinking along the same line of thought. Then I thought of just pullling the stand pipe, and everything out through a bigger hole in the deck still in the mast........i2f

[seandepagnier]

I have cut my furuno radar cable and re-spliced it. The radar is working fine. You could use a junction box too so it would be easy to connect and disconnect. There were 9 copper wires and a coax.

[Charlie]

Originally Posted by imagine2frolic

This interesting, because I was thinking along the same line of thought. Then I thought of just pullling the stand pipe, and everything out through a bigger hole in the deck still in the mast........i2f

The problem I have is that the end connector at the radar will not go thru the same path as the cable. I removed the connector at the radar dome as it is easy to remove and reinstall. This would be a different situation on different boats.

Originally Posted by geckosenator

I have cut my furuno radar cable and re-spliced it. The radar is working fine. You could use a junction box too so it would be easy to connect and disconnect. There were 9 copper wires and a coax.

I think that I would use a terminal block to do it. I still have the length of cable that runs from the radar CRT to the mast base (as I didn't have time to remove it) in place. The new cable had to take a different route because it was shorter. I'll look at the boat and see if I have enough slack to do put in some kind of junction.

[phantomracer]

here is what the previous owner did for our furuno radar. works quite well

Paul

[Charlie]

That is exactly what I was thinking of doing. If I had been smart I would have tried doing that before replacing the other cable because the broken part was probably in the connector that they used.

[capbillh]

The Garmin systems use RJ-45 and 8 wire twisted pair cable. That is regular CAT-5 cable. Just keep the twisted pairs twisted up to the terminal block partitions to retard interference.