AIS installion on Bavaria Ocean 38

[1simon]

HI All,

I am planning to install AIS on my Bavaria Ocean 38.
Boat already has an old vhf antenna mounted on the mast whihc was used for with a Shipmate RS800 (  handheld doe snot work any longer)
I have ben recommended Emtrak B924 which comes with an intergated splitter or B922 and a seperate splitter.  The AIS transceiver would then connect to Navionics instaleld on a tablet via wifi.  My current chartplotter is old and does not support AIS and i really do not wish to spend more money than necessary.

Anybody has any experience with such insatllation?  One worry is the VHF antenna  - does it need to be specially installed or will an old antenna work ok?

Any feedback would be much appreciated.

Thank you
Simon

[Yngmar]

I've had very bad experience with splitters that kept dying or locking onto the wrong path permanently, on several boats. We had the VHF antenna on the mast top and the AIS antenna on the stern arch, which gave us no problems apart from a faulty connection once. Also if the mast had ever fallen over the side, we would've had a backup antenna ready to plug over.

A VHF antenna is normally tuned to channel 16, which is at 156.8 MHz, while AIS uses 162 MHz. A VHF antenna will work, but one tuned specifically for AIS will work better. You can do this yourself though, by chopping a few carefully calculated millimeters off a standard VHF antenna. I did so and found a notable improvement in AIS range. It's not critically important though. The splitter is likely to cause trouble, although I haven't heard one of the emtrak integrated ones fail (yet) - they're fairly new though! The Simrad ones were notorious for it.

[Jeffatoms]

Just this week I finished "tweaking" my chartplotter/AIS install on our 38 Ocean.  We actually have two fully redundant systems, both have AIS linked into used Raymarine E80's i picked up for pennies.  The nav station is connected to the Standard Horizon GX2200 VHF radio that is AIS receive-only.  The E80 that swings out into the cockpit companionway is connected to an Em-Trak B900 series that came with a splitter and is mounted on the outside of the nav station seat.

We purchased it from Milltech and they did all of the preprogramming.  My only regret is not getting the wi-fi version to connect to a tablet or smartphone.  Installation was easy and the location and splitter seem fine so far.  In the case of the chartplotters, they were only $250/$190/free, respectively and well worth the cost.  I actually ended up with three E80's (free gear table in the marina) to replace the C80 that was already installed at the nav station -a simple swap.  Radar is shared.   And I have a spare radar dome as well from the free table.

I definitely recommend the transceiver and chartplotter combo.

[1simon]

Jeffatoms , am curious to know where in the Ocean 38  you  placed the Em -Trak Ais?

[Jeffatoms]

We placed it on the outside of the nav station seat, just below the flip up seat.   This placement allowed easy access to the distribution panel and a free breaker. The antenna splitter is just inside nav station cubby.  Works just fine down low.