Prewired for Simrad?

[maby]

It's time to select and fit the navigation gear to Vixen. I'm told that new Jeanneaus come pre-wired for Simrad gear. I opened the instrument pod at the binnacle to check and found what appears to be a free 12v power cable terminated in female spade connectors and a thin multicore cable terminated in a small blue multipin plug. I've never examined a Simnet plug in detail before, but the plug I'm seeing is not what I was expecting - I should have taken a picture, but didn't have a camera handy. Does anyone know what this connector is? Is it Simnet?

[sitara]

Some new Jeanneau models come pre-wired for Simrad. My new SO36i (on the wharf in France waiting for a ship) has Raymarine wiring. I understand that the SO379 and SO409 come with Simrad wiring but I don't know about other models. Also both Raymarine and Simrad wiring systems are NMEA 2000 compatible (or near compatible) so probably have very similar plugs.

I have a Raymarine Seatalk ng backbone cable which is black with a heavy blue stripe and round five pin blue male connectors. As I understand it this has to plug into a five-way connector and instruments are then connected to the five-way connector with spur cables which have a white stripe with white male connectors.

The Simrad system allows for daisy-chaining of instruments, the Raymarine Seatalk ng system does not.

Hope this helps, I will know more when the boat arrives and I start to wire it up.
Rob

[maby]

A quick follow-up on my post of a few months ago to tell any interested parties what I have discovered having got the electronics for our 33i installed and running.

You must understand that we took delivery of the boat with no electronics installed - if you order with at least basic instrumentation installed from the factory, some of the omissions described below will be plugged.

The boat is, indeed, "prewired for Simrad" - in the sense that there is a basic Simnet network installed by the factory. At the back of the electronics compartment at the navigation table there is a seven port simnet hub and this is cabled to another seven port hub in the transom - accessible through the removeable panel in the aft cabin wall. There were two Simnet to NMEA2000 Micro-c cables plugged into the hub at the nav table with one running down to the bilge forward of the mast ready for the speed/depth sender and the other to the base of the mast ready for the wind instrument.

Another Simnet cable runs from the hub in the transom up the binnacle to the instrument pod - this terminates with a Simnet plug, not NMEA2000 Micro-C. Our boat came with a Simrad Sonic hub fitted and this was cabled into the hub at the nav table.

I bought two Lowrance HDS plotters - one to install at the wheel and the other to install at the nav table (got a good deal!). The Lowrances use Micro-C connectors rather than Simnet, so I also bought adaptor cables - Simnet on one end and Micro-C on the other.

I plugged it all up, turned it on - and nothing worked! Nothing! Checking the network diagnostics at each plotter showed that the NMEA2000 network was "off" - internet research indicated that this usually meant that the network was not powered - and sure enough, tracing everything through showed that there was no Simnet power connection... No terminators either!

I purchased a Simnet power cable with terminator and a separate Simnet terminator. Connected the power cable to the hub at the nav table and a fused 12v connection on the distribution panel - green lights came on at both hubs! I plugged the terminator into the transom hub and powered it all up - still didn't work, but the diagnostics screen showed that the bus was "on" with an enormous number of errors. I unplugged the terminator from the hub in the transom, forced both plotters to reinitialise, and it all worked! Now, my plotters can see each other and either can control the Sonic Hub. For speed during commissioning, I had installed Tacktick speed/depth and wind instruments, so the cables running to the bilge and mast base are disconnected at the hub - leaving them in causes a storm of errors since they are not terminated.

So, the long and the short of it is that modern Jeanneaus are indeed "pre-wired for Simrad", but a few important components may be missing and unused cables plugged in that will cause network errors since they are not terminated! Presumably, if you ordered the boat with at least minimal Simrad instrumentation factory installed, they would have added the components that were missing in our boat...

[sitara]

Maybe: Good to know you got the wiring sorted.

Having said (above) that the SO36i was pre-wired for Raymarine instruments I found that when the boat arrived there was no instrument wiring at all. No instruments were ordered with the boat and Raymarine instruments have been fitted here. This was not a big issue as the wiring loom was reasonably easy to access and we would have had to run extra wires back to the instrument pod anyway.

The one wiring "error" that I have found on the boat is a missing control box for the water level gauge. Hopefully one is on the way...