Maretron N2K Cabling and Gear

[s/v Jedi]

Today I seriously started the N2K cabling aboard Jedi. 80% of all components is from Maretron, the rest Furuno.

With this post I want to show the T's, yellow power-T, connectors (incl. field attachable) and hubs from Maretron:


I have chosen to buy all ready-made cables and cut some of them to specific lengths and put new connectors on. I was surprised how well the field attachable connectors are (the black ones in the photo). The construction is like military spec for all these cabling components.

I put the little 4-port hub directly on a T because this is just a test setup. There will be a cable inserted there to mount the hub on some distance from the T in the backbone. These hubs are really small and also waterproof.

The "GPS" labeled cable goes to the 32-channel Maretron GPS sensor and the "Wind" labelled cable to their ultra-sonic wind/weather instrument that has no moving parts. The cable with the blue molded-on connector goes to the Maretron compass/gyro/magnetometer/accelerometer sensor and a little further on I have a Furuno GP-33 GPS and a Maretron DSM-250 display connected. It all works 100%.

Maretron has an application for free download to design your network. It calculates the power budget and check for the cabling lengths to stay in spec etc. It also generates shopping lists for the components. Spiff.

Warning: this stuff is so amazing that I get the urge to buy way more sensors and expand the network. While each one is affordable, there's so much one can connect to the backbone that it can add up to serious expenses

ciao!
Nick.

[twistedtree]

It is nice stuff, isn't it. I did a similar refit on my boat over the winter so now it's all N2K, Furuno ethernet, and one little 0183 stub for the VHFs.

My autopilot is a simrad which is all N2K electrically, but their cabling is proprietary. I just cut off their proprietary plug ends and attached the field-installable Maretron cable ends and it all works great.

I didn't use the hubs, but instead just used back to back T fittings to get the number of drops that I needed at any given location. It seems I always needed more or fewer drops than the hubs provided to they didn't make sense in my installation.

My only complaint it that the stuff is awfully expensive. High quality, but very expensive.