Tag: Blue Opal
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A weekend adventure (and a lifeboat shout)
Earlier in the month, I had decided that I’d try a jaunt down the coast to see how far I could get on a single ebb tide, and then I’d come back up on the flood; I estimated that it’d basically be a day spent sailing, and that I could reach Wicklow Head. The forecast…
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Sunday fiddling
I was going to slip Blue Opal today, but ended up offering my slot to another boat that needed the slot more than I did. After being boatman for a bit, and having a good chinwag over a cuppa with some other members (boats, COVID, parasites, and other topics) I went out to the boat…
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Wiring in the B600s – Saturday
I spent part of Friday, and most of Saturday working on getting the AIS unit integrated into Blue Opal’s network, measuring the output of the engine tachometer, and generally fiddling with the electrical wiring locker (tidying it mostly). The end result is that the locker is tidier, the B600s is mounted properly in the locker,…
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Wiring in the B600s – Friday
I spent part of Friday, and most of Saturday working on getting the AIS unit integrated into Blue Opal’s network, measuring the output of the engine tachometer, and generally fiddling with the electrical wiring locker (tidying it mostly). The end result is that the locker is tidier, the B600s is mounted properly in the locker,…
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Alarm sentences from the B600s
The B600s emits some custom sentences to indicate that there are problems (and also turns on a LED labeled “Err”). Some begin with PAMC, others with AIALR. If I remember the NMEA spec correctly, P* are proprietary, so PAMC is Proprietary AMC (Alltek Marine also call themselves AMEC). $PAMC,R,TXT,010,Power anomalies:0.00V*56 $PAMC,R,TXT,200,GPS antenna is not detected*75…
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Configuring the AIS unit
I finally decided to acquire an AIS transceiver for Blue Opal, and went with one that talks both NMEA 0183 and NMEA 2000; an Alltek Marine B600s. It should happily chat with the Miniplex3, which will deal with sending the received AIS transmissions to something like my iPad (as there is no chartplotter or MFD…