OneDown
New Member
First off, hello everybody! This is my first post and I'm very excited to be here and get and share advice with fellow Sea Ray owners. My wife and I just bought our first boat and we couldn't be more excited!
with that being said, let's get to the fun stuff. My main question is how and what do I need to do/buy for a NMEA 2000 system? To make this simpler let me explain my goal.
Our boat came standard with Navman 5500. I know they have problems and I know they've been bought out so I'm fixing issues before they occur. My vision is to buy the Raymarine A68 with chirp to replace Navman. I'm next looking to buy a dsc and ais equipped vhf (possibly icom's) and then since boat already equipped with external gps I'll swap that out with NMEA 2000 compatible one. I want the ais to be visible on my plotter. Now since my boat has nothing NMEA 2000 I know I have to bring all 3 devices into it. That is where I get lost. Do I need a backbone or can I simply run it into a power supply Navman is already connected to and leave it at that? I'm not interested in fuel consumption or engine diags as I'll use the current smartcraft system in place.
Any and all advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!
with that being said, let's get to the fun stuff. My main question is how and what do I need to do/buy for a NMEA 2000 system? To make this simpler let me explain my goal.
Our boat came standard with Navman 5500. I know they have problems and I know they've been bought out so I'm fixing issues before they occur. My vision is to buy the Raymarine A68 with chirp to replace Navman. I'm next looking to buy a dsc and ais equipped vhf (possibly icom's) and then since boat already equipped with external gps I'll swap that out with NMEA 2000 compatible one. I want the ais to be visible on my plotter. Now since my boat has nothing NMEA 2000 I know I have to bring all 3 devices into it. That is where I get lost. Do I need a backbone or can I simply run it into a power supply Navman is already connected to and leave it at that? I'm not interested in fuel consumption or engine diags as I'll use the current smartcraft system in place.
Any and all advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!