Upgrading our Ranger Tug R-25 with AIS and Boat Internet
Rationale - Why Do You Want To Do This?
The reason is obviously different for the two, and neither is necessary. Automated Identification System (AIS) can operate in silent or bi-directional mode. In silent mode it receives AIS transmissions from any vessels transmitting them, including their radio station identifiers (MMSI) numbers. The information includes the vessel’s heading and speed, and the system automatically looks up the vessel name. If the AIS is plugged into your helm navigation station you will see all this information displayed on your screen. It will also warn you if you are on a collision course with that vessel. In bi-directional mode AIS also transmits this information from your vessel so that any other AIS equipped vessels can see it. AIS is required on all commercial vessels above 65 feet in U.S. waters, and any passenger ship or vessel over 300 gross tons under international rules. It is not required on pleasure boats at this time, but the requirements have become stricter over time since 9/11/2001. Personally, I would recommend it at least on any vessel that operates in commercial shipping lanes with any regularity.
If I were doing only one upgrade, I would do AIS, because I see it as a safety issue. Once after I did the upgrade we were out cruising Admiralty Inlet and the Strait of Juan De Fuca in Washington. I had upgraded the software on my Garmin system right as we started the trip and, while all the rest of the system had restarted just fine, the AIS had not. It must have been stuck somehow because it just wasn’t receiving or transmitting. I should have stopped the boat, shut everything down, turned off the house battery to turn off the NMEA 2000 bus, and restarted everything, but I was impatient to go and figured I’d deal with it when we arrived. Mistake. We passed a large container ship in Admiralty Inlet. When we got to the Strait of Juan de Fuca we realized the weather forecast had completely failed us. Windy was saying the winds were 11 knots and the swells 1.1’ with a 3.1 second duration. In reality, the winds were 25 knots, and the swells were 5-6 feet with a 2 second duration, which is a lot to handle in a 25’ boat. I was so busy steering into the wind and trying to navigate the waves that I didn’t look to my sides as much as I should have. The radar was spinning, but with the seas almost as high as the mast where the radar was mounted it wasn’t picking up very much. We also couldn’t go at our usual 28-30 knots. I was only able to make 10-12 knots since I had to constantly modulate power to deal with the waves. Consequently, the container ship caught up with us. I realized that when it was less than a quarter mile away. I’m certain they did not see me from the bridge and as my AIS wasn’t working, I didn’t see them either until I looked out the starboard side. At that point, my only option was to do a sharp 90 degree turn to starboard and let them pass me, then go around their stern through their wake. I couldn’t make enough speed to cut in front of them. Cargo ship wake is no joke, but in the seas we were already dealing with it actually wasn’t that bad. However, the scary situation could have been handled had I taken the time to ensure my AIS was working. They would have seen me on their screens, and I would have seen them and gotten a warning. In the future, we’re not leaving port without working AIS if we’re planning on transiting shipping channels.
The boat internet upgrade was completely different. Many boaters have a Starlink dish for Internet uplink. Starlink is your best bet if you need Internet access outside of cellular range and away from marina WiFi connections. You will often see WiFi networks in marinas presented from Starlink dishes. However, Starlink also costs a substantial amount of money for relatively little data service. If you’re in a marina with WiFi you probably want to try to use that instead. However, that requires moving all the Internet-connected devices in your boat from the Starlink connection to the marina WiFi. Tomorrow, when you are at a new marina, you have to do it again. Day after tomorrow when you’re anchored at Stuart Island for the night, you don’t have any marina WiFi. However, you are close enough to populated land that you could hook up to a cellular data service, if your antenna is strong enough.
That’s where a more sophisticated boat internet comes in handy. I went with a Peplink based system but there are other options. The system consist of a network bridge. You will see it listed as a router, which it technically also is, but in network parlance, the most important functionality it has is the ability to bridge one network physical layer - WiFi, cellular, or wired, to another, wired or WiFi. This bridge functionality is actually its most important function, hence why I primarily refer to it as a bridge. It also is a router - a device that routes traffic from one network physical layer out to a broader network. This bridging is the cool part. Your bridge, the Peplink Max BR1 Pro 5G in my case, accepts multiple inputs for the Internet uplink. I don’t yet have the Starlink - I haven’t needed it yet - but I do have a cellular SIM card in it and it also supports WiFi 5 GHz and 2.4 GHz along with a wired connection for Starlink. You configure the priority order of these. In my case, if WiFi 5G is available, it will select that. If not, it will try 2.4 GHz WiFi. If that doesn’t work, it falls back to cellular. I have one SIM card from Google Fi because with Google Fi service a data only SIM is free. If all that fails and there is a wired connection, to a Starlink dish, it will fall back to that. That’s the uplink. Each time you get to a new marina that has WiFi, if you feel like it, connect to 192.168.50.1 on your phone and connect the Peplink to the new marina WiFi.
The router part of the Peplink bridge then presents a boat-specific WiFi network like “Lone Ranger Tug”. You then tell all the various WiFi capable devices on the boat to use that network and automatically, they all connect to the Internet using whichever uplink in the priority order is available. E.g., we hooked up a small temperature and humidity monitor to it so that when we’re in port we can keep an eye on the temperature and make sure it’s comfortable for the doggies.
Having a single Boat Internet connection is purely a convenience feature, but it enables useful things like the temperature monitor I mentioned. It also enables whole boat monitoring like Roam. The way I have it hooked up below it’s connected to the House battery switch, so the Boat Internet is turned off when the House battery is turned off. If you want it on all the time you could hook it up to the 24x7 panel, but I’d carefully estimate your power consumption if you’re going to do that so you don’t come back to drained batteries unless you’re on shore power.
It took me a total of three days to upgrade everything. I wasn’t exactly working full time on it and it took a lot of figuring things out for the first time, and, of course, several trips to the parts stores to get stuff I didn’t know I needed. My hope with this write-up is that it won’t take you three days.
Day 1
Today was the start of this project. I never intended to finish the project in one day. The project involves adding a Garmin AIS 800 transceiver and a Peplink Max BR1 Pro 5G to a 2024 Ranger Tug R-25. These are obviously two very different pieces of equipment, but the first challenge is the same for both.
If you are doing this on an R-27 your job is a little easier. The standard wiring harness for that boat includes a DC wire pair that was intended to be used for a mast-mounted spot-light that is not installed on that boat. To check if that wire pair is there, remove the teak panel in the ceiling just above the entrance to the v-berth. If you find a spare wire pair there that are not connected to anything you can use those to power the Peplink. If you are doing this on an R-25, however, you need to run those power wires yourself. That was the day 1 job.
However, before we get to that, we have another problem to solve. The R-25 comes with two 12-blade fuse blocks mounted on the wood panel in the head - behind the dash. The problem is, both of them are fully occupied. There is not a single fuse slot left to add any more accessories. These are not the only two 12v panels in the boat. There is a 24x7 panel in the aft section of the mid berth as well. However, it is not suitable for these accessories for two reasons. First, and most important, it is an always-on panel. I do not want the internet and AIS to be on when the boat is in storage, draining the battery. Second, pulling wire on a boat is a real pain in the neck, and pulling it to that panel would be worse than that.
The solution is to add another panel. I decided to add a Blue Sea four blade block. I attached it to a bit of spare room on the panel that holds the other two blocks. Then I plan to jumper the positive wire from one of the existing blocks to this one using a short section (about a foot) of 8 AWG cable. The Ranger Tugs do not have negative posts on their fuse blocks, and neither does the one I got. The negative wires are all attached in a bundle to a bus that is mounted inside the access area behind the dash. I can mount mine in the same place.
Next, you need to run power for the Peplink. The AIS will get mounted behind the dash, so I don’t need to run separate power for that. However, the Peplink does require power.
Before you run the power for the Peplink though, you need to decide which antenna to use. I ended up using the Pepwave because that was what was available when I did this. However, since then, Peplink has released the Antenna Max. It stores the actual router inside the antenna. This means you do not need to store the router inside the boat and you can have a much cleaner installation with no visible parts inside the boat. You would still need to run power to the router though, just that in this case you run it all the way up the mast. If you go this option, you can do it one of two ways. You could use 16x2 AWG wire like I’m stating here. Alternatively, you can run an exterior grade CAT5e or better Ethernet cable. Then you would use a PoE injector at the source of that cable to supply the power, and a PoE splitter that you can store inside the antenna. The Peplink Splitter Max fits inside the antenna alongside the router according to Peplink.
For the rest of this discussion, I will assume you’re running DC power and will mount the router inside the boat. If you are using the Antenna Max you would simply run more 16x2 wire up to the mast, and if you are running Ethernet for PoE, you can equally easily adjust everything. If you are running 16x2 AWG wire it is going from the panel in the head to wherever you mount your Peplink. Since the antenna for it will get mounted on the mast, and the wires for that will come out behind the teak panel in the ceiling, I mounted my router there, and ran the power to that point. Martin Nethkin has a great video on this on his site showing how he did it on his R-27. He did not have to run the power lead though. If I were to do this again, however, I would have run power up the mast and used the new Antenna Max. Most of these instructions are the same, however.
To start, I took off the teak panel. It is attached with some SQ1 screws. The light is attached to it, and I didn’t see an easy way to remove it, so I left it on and just leaned the panel up on the dash. Next you need to run the wire over to where the starboard porthole is. Remove the inside of that porthole. The silver trim is attached with four SQ2 screws, and the inner plastic bit is attached with two SQ1 screws. Remove both parts and you will see inside that wood panel. There are wires already in there.
Now, if you look in the ceiling of the boat just above the starboard porthole you will see a light. The wire run needs to do a 90 degree turn just by that light from the ceiling into the panel by the porthole. You probably will want to remove that light to make this easier. The stainless trim unscrews and then pops off. That will make the eyeball itself fall out. If you have really small fingers, this may be all you need, but I have medium sized fingers, so I removed the inner part as well, which is screwed in with three SQ0 screws. This allowed me to just push the fish tape from the slot in the center of the ceiling behind the teak panel, straight over to starboard to where that light is. Then I taped the end of the wire to the fish tape, and pulled it through to the center of the boat. The first, and easiest, part is now done.
To make the 90 degree turn from the ceiling you probably can’t use the fish tape. Unless it is metal (I unwisely left my metal one at home), it just won’t make that turn. Even if it did, you would you would have to run it from the top down into the side panel if you managed to make the turn. Then you could tape it to another fish tape, and pull that tape back to that little light hole, tape the cable to it, and pull it back down to the port hole. If you have two fish tapes, that probably would work.
Personally, I found it easier to use the Park Tool wire routing kit that I use to work on bikes. It’s small and soft, and it was easy to push that through the light hole and around the corner down inside the panel by the port hole. Then I simply attached the wire to the other end and carefully pulled it through. I now had the wire run all the way to the port hole.
Now take a break, because the next part is exhausting. If you poke your fish tape down inside the panel by the port hole you will find it makes a hard stop at the bottom. That’s because there is almost no room there for you to fish through. If I have the opportunity, I really want to ask the designers why it was designed this way. The exterior fiberglass panel and the support panel for the wood paneling by the port hole only have a hole that’s, maybe, 3/16 of an inch wide. You won’t be able to fish through that from the top. It looks like this:
The solution is to remove the fridge. Take off the top left bolt using a hex driver. Then, remove the door and set it aside. Next, using a Philips head screwdriver, remove the two bottom metal holders for the door that are held on with the only six Philips screws in the boat. You must remove those because otherwise the fridge won’t fit in the aisle of the boat on an R-25. Next, using a long SQ2 bit, remove the four screws holding the fridge in and slide it out. Push it out of the way into the aisle. You should not need to disconnect the wiring. Now if you crawl into the hole and look up you will see the fiberglass panels I described. You will need something thin to fish through this space because your fish tape likely won’t fit! I think a 4-5 foot section of 12 or 14 gauge power cable, like you use in a house, might work too, but the entire wrap won’t fit. I had a 25’ section of 16x2 though, so I took the end that was hanging down from the ceiling, poked it through the gap and up to the port hole. Then I taped the two ends together and pulled them carefully through the gap. Now I had the power cable into the cave behind the fridge. At this point it was easy to poke the fish tape through from the panel in the head, tape the cable to it, and pull it the rest of the way through.
That was the end of Day 1 for me. If you have time to continue, read on to Day 2.
Day 2
When I left on Day 1 I had a power cable to the overhead panel but it wasn’t hooked up yet. The first task on Day 2 was to install the new fuse block. I just put it next to the existing ones on the door in the head. There is plenty of room for it but I suggest keeping things a little tight just in case you need the space later. Cut a small piece of 8 gauge cable that will let you get from the new fuse block to one of the existing ones and put a couple of heat shrink wraps on it. Then install and crimp the red ring terminals on each end. Heat shrink the ring terminals, then the heat shrink wrap. Now install that by jumpering it between the red post on one of the existing fuse blocks to the red post on the new one. Tighten then nuts down. I’d remove the fuses now. No reason to power up the devices until you really want to.
Next, you need to strip the wrap off the power wire. The red wire (positive) goes to the new fuse block you just installed, and the yellow needs to go to the negative block. You need to strip about 24” to be able to reach both because the negative fuse block is sitting on the shelf inside the electrical access panel, to the port side. Go ahead and make sure you have enough. Then put a piece of heat shrink wrap over each of the wire and crimp on the fork terminals. It is best to stick to the red and yellow color scheme for positive and negative. Heat shrink the terminals on. Then you can connect the red side to the new fuse block. The yellow side needs to be piggy backed onto any of the existing negative connections. They are all full, so pick one and connect it there. Finally, use a few cable ties to tie the wires down neatly so they don’t move but the door closes properly. Now you have your power connected.
Next you need to install the antenna on the mast and run the cables through the roof into the cabin. You need to decide where to install the antenna. Personally, I didn’t see a reason to have the TV antenna. I haven’t watched broadcast TV for over 15 years and I certainly don’t plan to start in the boat. I just removed the TV antenna (the flat-like disk on the lower rung of the mast) and installed the Peplink BR42 there. One issue is that the holes for the TV antenna do not line up with the holes in the mount for the peplink. You are going to need to mark new holes and drill those. You’re going to want to try to keep the metal shavings contained using a dam. Martin shows how to use tape to create a dam in his video. Then mount the the base to the mast. When you have mounted the antenna, run the wires through the mast and make sure you make a bend in the wires that is large enough to allow the mast to fold.
If you look at the way the mast is mounted on the R-25/R-27 it is sitting on a fiberglass piece that is attached on top of the roof. Martin shows how to remove and reinstall that as he ran his cables through both that and the roof. I installed my deck seal just aft of that part, which saved me from having to remove it. Once you remove the teak panel in the ceiling you will see a cut-out that runs lengthwise in the boat. If you measure carefully from the windshield to the very back end of that, and then compare that measurement to what you see on the roof of the boat, you will find that the aft end of that cut-out actually is behind the fiberglass piece that holds the mast. Run a small drill bit through the ceiling from the inside and you should see daylight! I discovered that there was plenty of room aft of that unit to mount the deck seal. I did not try it, but you may be able to mount the Peplink antenna directly to the roof and avoid the $200 expense for the stainless steel mounts. Measure carefully if you are going to try this, and you may loose a little signal strength if you do, but it might work. The antenna comes with a double sided adhesive that would keep it secure, but I would also add a bead of marine grade silicone around it if I were to do it that way.
In my case, I used the drill hole I ran up from the inside as a marker. Then I drilled a series of ⅜” holes in the fiberglass using a forstner bit to create a channel to run the 7 cables from the antenna through. Martin’s tip is great: run the forstner bits in reverse until you break through the gel coat. That will protect the gel coat from splintering.
If you are using the Antenna Max this is where your life gets easier. You only need one hole! Drill that and run either your CAT5e or your DC power wires through it.
If you are running the antennas into the cabin like I did, drill the necessary series of holes in the rubber seal in the deck seal and route all the cables through it and into the cabin. Mount the deck seal to the fiberglass using the adhesive tape it comes with and appropriate screws (pre-drill holes first). Use as much marine grade silicone as you can to seal it up really really well. Now clean up the roof. You will have fiberglass and metal shavings up there and you’ll want to get those off. House it off if you have to, or blow it off with a compressed air hose if you can. Finally, use the tubing wire conduit to protect the wires from chafing. Now you can return to the cabin.
I mounted the Peplink upside down on the underside of the teak panel. Assuming you are going to install a SIM card in it (which is kind of the point) do yourself a favor and install the SIM card before you mount it. It is a LOT easier to do it now than to try to figure out how to get it in once it is mounted.
Again, if you’re mounting the router inside the cabin you’re going to want to drill a hole through the teak panel to run the wires through. The Peplink comes with a small GPS receiver. You don’t need it. The BR42 antenna already has a GPS receiver. On mine the cable for the GPS receiver was marked “GNSS”. Yours may say “GPS”. Decide where you want to mount the router and then drill a hole that allows you to reach it with the cables. You don’t have a lot of cable to play with, but you have plenty to mount the peplink toward the front of the cabin and out of the way. A ¾” hole is just enough for the cables. Mount the router and then drill the hole.
This is where you need to figure out the power. If you are using PoE, follow the instructions for the PoE splitter. If you are wiring it directly, you have two options. One is to pay Peplink an extra $20 for a plug that has a DC pigtail on it. I didn’t do that. The bridge comes with an AC/DC converter. Martin was the first one to figure out that you can just cut the cable it comes with and wire that up as is. Cut it long enough so you can reach the bridge comfortably. Do that and strip the cover off and you will find a red, a white, and a black wire. Black is positive. Red is ignition, and white is negative (thank you to Martin for figuring this out and posting it in his video). The ignition wire is in case you want the bridge to only be on when you have the ignition on. You don’t. Tie the ignition together with the positive wire. Put a heat shrink wrap on the wires that is longer than the butt connector. Then connect both of those to the red wire on the power wire you ran down to the new fuse block earlier using a butt connector (or the spotlight wire if you have an R-27. Crimp it securely and heat shrink it. Do the same with the white wire to the yellow wire. Now run all the cables, the ones from the antenna and your power pigtail through the hole in the teak panel.
Reinstall the teak panel and connect all the wires to the Peplink bridge. They are all labeled, so this is really easy. Once that’s done, power it up! If you’ve done everything right, all you have to do is turn on the house battery and it will work.
The router can be controlled using either the Peplink app (address is 192.168.50.1), the InControl app, or the web interface. The InControl app requires a subscription, but it comes with a year. The Peplink app is not particularly useful. I found it easiest to just use the web interface. The only problem is that it is clear-text http so you will get a warning every time you connect to it. Once you are here you can configure it. I don’t have a Starlink system hooked to it, but in case I ever get one, I made the Ethernet port the priority. If that’s not connected, but WiFi is, that will take priority. If that doesn’t work it will use the cellular connection. I only have one SIM card in it. You can install two if you want to have better coverage. There are some carriers that work better in some places than others. Mine is a Google Fi SIM card. Google Fi is an MVNO for T-Mobile, so it uses the T-Mobile network, which works great from Seattle to the San Juan islands. It is also free, which is nice. If you have Google Fi you can get a Data Only SIM for free. The data usage is billed to your main line, but since I have unlimited data, it means I don’t pay for it. I used the web interface to set up a boat WiFi network, and now when I get on the boat my phone, iPad, computer, etc hop on the boat WiFi, which bridges to Google Fi using a very strong antenna, and backhauls over the cellular network. It works great!
Day 3
This day was to finalize the AIS installation. The hardest part of this was actually to figure out where and how to mount it. I had to remove the refrigerator (for the umpteenth time) to run the power for the Peplink, but I put it back when I was done. Honestly, I couldn’t face removing it again. Otherwise I probably would have found a reasonable place to mount the AIS behind the fridge. There’s a bit of room left back there as long as you’re willing to pull the fridge out and crawl in there. If you do that, your day will simply consist of removing the fridge, fishing a power wire through from the head, mounting the AIS, and connecting the power wires. You also need to fish a NMEA 2000 cable from the AIS though. That needs to go back to the power panels in the head as well.
Personally, I built a little shelf that I attached using Velcro straps inside the cavity for the power panels inside the head. There was just enough room there and some careful cutting of ¼” plywood gave me a neat little shelf that still allowed the hatch to close and stay closed.
Once you have the AIS mounted you need to power it. It actually comes with a power harness. The manual shows how to connect it. It has four wires, but if you just want power you can ignore the green and yellow wires. The green is used to provide a toggle switch to set the AIS to silent mode, meaning it will only receive AIS signals but not transmit. I don’t really want that, so I didn’t bother connecting it. The yellow is used for power ground in an NMEA 0813 system, and the R-25 is NMEA 2000, so that’s also not needed.
Next you need to connect an antenna. The most common way to do that is to use the VHF antenna that you already have on the boat. If you carefully poke your arm through you can feel where that antenna (white cable) is attached to your VHF radio. Disconnect that and connect it to the VHF splitter that comes with the AIS. Then connect one of the leads from the splitter to your radio and the other to the AIS transceiver.
Now comes the slightly tricky bit: you have to upgrade your NMEA bus. The default bus installed by the factory comes with five single T’s. That’s enough for the standard equipment, but it doesn’t work if you are adding anything. I had already one of the single T’s with a double-T for my Lenco Autoglide (I’ll talk more about this later, but the summary is that I kind of wish I hadn’t installed it).
If you are only adding the AIS transceiver you only need to add one port to your NMEA 2000 bus. There is enough room to simply remove one of the existing single T’s and replace it with a double.
If you are adding more items, or already did, there is not enough physical room to fit another double T behind the screen. In this case you need to upgrade the whole bus. To solve this problem, since I had the Autoglide already, I ended up removing all the single T-s and replacing them with two 4-port T’s. One port is left unused, but that’s fine. You can put a terminator on that one.
To upgrade your NMEA bus, you need to remove the GPS screen. Sitting in the helm, slide the little black plastic bits off to expose the screws holding it to the helm.They are SQ-1 I believe. Remove all the screws and the whole screen lifts out. Take a picture of where everything goes, and then start disconnecting all the NMEA 2000 connectors. When you’re done with that, unscrew the screws holding the existing T or T’s on and remove the T’s. Unplug the thing or things connected to them and plug them into your new 2 or 4-port T’s. Then reattach the new T’s with the existing screws. Plug the AIS into one of the unused connectors and install terminators on any unused connectors. You can now reinstall the screen.
Testing
At this point you should have your AIS all mounted and ready to go! If you wired everything correctly you should be able to turn on the house batteries and it should all light up. The first thing you should probably do is use the Active Captain app to ensure all the Garmin equipment is fully updated. It will update the AIS as well, but the AIS transceiver will not show up in Active Captain for some reason. It will, however, show up in the Navigation menu on your Garmin. You can configure things like alarms on dangerous ships there. You can try using that alarm, but it considers any ship inside a specific radius dangerous, which isn’t really useful unless you’re on the ocean, so I turned that off.
Once you update the Garmin system it will reboot. In my experience, the AIS does not come back up when you do this. I have to shut the house power off, and for good measure, I shut off the engines and thruster batteries too. Then I brought the whole boat back up and then the AIS started working.
The first time you use the AIS it will probably take a few minutes before other ships start showing up. If you’re in a busy marina with larger vessels that usually come with AIS you will start seeing them show up on the plotter.
It will take longer before your own boat shows up. It took half an hour or more for mine. You can check it using an app like Marine Traffic. It could take up to a week before your vessel name shows up because the Vessel Information Verification System (VIVS) is only updated weekly. Until that is updated with the name you will see your MMSI number not the vessel name.
Enjoy your new upgrades! These two are my favorite upgrades yet and they’re definitely ones I would do again.
Parts Used
Common
- Blue Sea Four Blade Fuse Block - https://a.co/d/fEKZBXX
- About a foot of 8 AWG cable
- 20 feet of 16x2 16 AWG marine grade wire (yellow and red is standard)
- Two 5/16” 8 AWG ring terminals, red. You only need these to be a quarter inch ring.
- Short bit of heat shrink wrap that fits on those ring terminals. Preferably red.
- 16 AWG fork terminals. You will need four of these.
- Some heat shrink wrap for the fork terminals. Get two yellow ones and two red ones and make sure they fit over the fork terminal wraps so you can heat shrink them good and sealed.
- Crimping tool - https://a.co/d/5z4XX7o
- Wire stripper - https://a.co/d/iOCvnlV
- Fish tape - https://a.co/d/4tUCD35
- #0 square (SQ0) bit. I avoid buying cheap tools, but a good kit for this that includes an SQ0 is hard to find. Here is one option.
- #1 square (SQ1) bit.
- Long #2 square bit (SQ2). The one in the kit above is not long enough to remove the screws for the fridge
- Cable routing kit - https://a.co/d/0HnIjn1. This is not necessary, and this particular one is expensive, but it was handy for a very small part of the cable run.
- Some cable ties to tie up the cables.
- A flush cut wire cutter to trim up the cable ties.
- It’s probably a good idea to get an assortment of Robertson/Square head screws too. Everything on the boat is square head.
- Forstner bits for cutting through the fiberglass and either a spade or forstner bit for cutting through the teak panel in the ceiling. You will want a ⅜” bit for the fiberglass, and a ¾” one for the teak panel.
- ⅜” steel drill bits. These will be used on the mast.
- A heat gun.
- Two 5 amp blade fuses.
- Two 16 ga butt connectors. Heat shrink is preferable.
- Marine grade silicone
AIS
- This doesn’t require a lot of extra parts. I got a Garmin 800 AIS. Make sure you buy it from a reputable supplier. I bought one from Amazon and was very confused when I opened it up and found a large GPS antenna in the box. When I looked carefully on the box I found that Amazon (yes, it was sold and shipped by Amazon) had sent me an XM radio instead. If you find one that’s cheap, it probably is for a reason. I ended up getting mine from NVN Marine. They will request your ship station license so they can program your MMSI into the unit before shipping it.
- At least one NMEA 2000 2 or 4-port T-connector - https://a.co/d/end387Q.
- NMEA 2000 terminators if any of your NMEA 2000 ports are left open.
- Two of the fork terminals (outlined above) and heat shrink.
Cellular Repeater
- Deck seal - https://a.co/d/7vLQR8w
- Tubing wire conduit - https://a.co/d/0KRjGqK
- Peplink Bridge - https://a.co/d/gf9Rjkn
- Peplink antenna - https://a.co/d/8paSrc. This is the original version that I used.
- Peplink Max is the new version that stores the repeater inside the antenna itself.
- Peplink mounting post female to mobility adapter, ACW-651 - https://a.co/d/a2cVnOc
- Peplink male adapter, ACW-653 - https://download.peplink.com/resources/peplink_premium_deck_mounts_datasheet.pdf
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