Hi all,
I have a plan to re-do the
instruments on my coast cruiser, but I wanted to put it out here to see what everyone thinks.
I have a 1984
Islander Bahama 30. It's located in Southern
California and is basically a coastal cruiser. It will no doubt one day make the trip down to the
Sea of Cortez for some cruising. I do some
racing for fun, but it's not really a
racing boat. I also like
single handling her.
I'm updating the
electronics on my
boat. She came with some older
Raymarine instruments running on
Seatalk. She has a
wind speed trandsducer, a through-hull
transducer, and a
depth sensor. She also had
radar. The outputs where a
wind and a speed readout mounted in the
cockpit bulkhead, and a display
screen mounted on the binnacle. The
depth finder was only readable on the binnacle. There was also an older analog
radar.
After getting the boat I removed the
wheel and binnacle. That meant pulling the
chartplotter. I capped those wires. At that point only the wind instrument continued to
work, I'm guessing because of how the through-hull was routed related to the computer. After I removed the radar the SOG stopped working because the
GPS was located next to the radar. So, currently I have no instruments.
I am not bothered by this and in fact I sort of like it; I found the instruments to be distracting.The only "instrument" I use now is
Navionics and Gaia
GPS, which I use for SOG and as chartplotters. So far these have worked great.
That said, I'm making some changes that are important, and I do want to add some instruments back in.
I already ordered a Geomex
AIS splitter and a Quark Box A027. Together those will let me receive
AIS over my regular
antenna and transmit this data over
wifi so that I can view AIS on my
phone or on my Samsung Galaxy which is my official
chartplotter. They both have GPS's integral to them so I can keep them in airplane mode to conserve their
batteries.
The Quarkbox has inputs and outputs for
NMEA 0183. I am split on how to proceed. I would really like to get the depth finder working again, as that is the key instrument for
safety that can tell me something I otherwise can't figure out from casual observation. To do that, I was thinking I could buy a
Seatalk ot NMEA0183 adapter and
plug that into the Quarkbox. That data would then be transmitted as NMEA0183 via
WiFi. On the other hand, I was thinking that I could ultimately replace all the old instruments with new
NMEA 2000 instruments, and put an
NMEA 0183 to
NMEA 2000 adapter from the Quark Box. Either way, the data would all be transmitted via wifi to my
phone and tablet.
This is a very complex topic, so right now my conservative plan for this coming weekend is to just get the
hardware installed and to get the AIS working on my phone and tablet. I think that's achievable. That said, what do you think of my plan to adapt the old instruments or to replace them? And is there any other cool stuff I could do with the Quark Box that I'm missing out on? I could run
Open CPN, for instance instead of
Navionics, but would I really get much more out of
Open CPN as compared to Navionics? Would it be easier to integrate my old instruments into a
single app using Open CPN?
Also, is there any advantage to integrating a GPS directly into the Quark box compared to using the phone and tablet? The one
safety feature I would like to have (for USSER) is a man
overboard button to mark a GPS location. You need to be able to do so in ten seconds for satisfy the reg for coastal racing (like racing around
Catalina Island), and I don't know if a phone or tablet would satisfy the
rule... or more importantly
work appropriately at task.
Thanks!
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