In the end, I didn’t save much money by combining the two systems. I struggled for a couple of hours with the hybrid cable that just wouldn’t go down the ridiculous 1-inch Edson pedestal guard (I had to do the splicing in the quarterberth, underneath the pedestal). I put it all together and powered up with some trepidation. No worries! Now I have AIS targets all over the place, and alarms going off for a potential collision with every barge and ferry that approaches my marina. The manufacturers like to pretend that their proprietary networks are unique, and they want you to buy their hardware. I talked to the (normally helpful) Garmin technical assistance people, and they got very snippy when I asked about integrating their devices onto the Raymarine network. In general, there seems to be a lot of hype in this domain. Thus, company literature likes to grandiosely refer to the backbones as “transmission lines”. In reality, I suspect that they are far less than that. The rise times are too long, the propagation distances too short and, anyway, a pair of humble copper wires hardly qualifies. The vaunted termination resistors on each end of the backbone are probably there simply because that is what the drive circuits expect to see in, essentially, mundane DC operation. So the bottom line is that (except for some exotic devices) slicing and dicing of cables should work for any brand of NMEA 2000 compatible network. You can even buy the hybrid cables, but they come in fixed lengths which isn’t always what is needed. I had to do a lot of research when I purchased my new to me 1994 E380 due to it having older Raymarine chart plotter, instruments and I was adding the new EV-100 autopilot. In fact, depending on age, Raymarine can be proprietary. NMEA has gone through changes over the years. If you are working with NMEA 2000 then all should be good, as devices can talk and listen on the same bus and should all be talking at the same baud rate, sending out standard NMEA sentences. All you need to do is get your wires spliced correctly and you can make adapter cables, which I did on my previous boat.
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