B&G NMEA 2000 wind broken cable.

[PeteLivez]

Wind days suddenly stopped. On investigation found that the cable had been previously repaired by soldering the five wires. One of them having now broken. I decided to use a field connector to make good the connections. But try as I might the wind no longer appears on either display. I’m pretty happy with all the connections, could I have shorted something?? Any other suggestions?

 

[Dockhead]

You're in a power boat, right? N2K to the top of a sailboat mast is not a good idea -- as I know from hard experience.

After losing a connection like this, the instrument might not automatically reappear in the displays. You should go to network settings, Devices list, and see if you see the wind instrument in the list of network devices. If not, then you don't have a connection with it for some reason. You can try powering the network down and back up; sometimes that helps.

If you see the wind instrument in the Devices list, then go to Sources. Go to "Apparent Wind", and tick the box for your wind instrument.

That should do the trick. Sometimes network configuration doesn't propagate well from a plotter so you might need to go into the network settings on one of your displays and do the same things there. Good luck.

 

[PaulRainbow]

You're in a power boat, right? N2K to the top of a sailboat mast is not a good idea -- as I know from hard experience.

Nothing wrong with N2K to the mast, it's on the backbone, not a drop cable.

 

[Dockhead]

Nothing wrong with N2K to the mast, it's on the backbone, not a drop cable.

Nothing wrong with it electrically (provided the voltage drop is in spec, and provided you have a terminator resistor there), but the cable is hard to pull, and having N2K termination at the very top banging around can cause faults. Something I found out the hard way on a dark and windy night between Riga and Bornholm once. That took my whole network down, including the autopilot.

All good wind instruments output either 0183 or analogue natively. It's best to take that cable below decks and convert to N2K down there, in my opinion.