RayMarine Instruments:
Charlie Freeman
Kamaloha 
Tayana 37
Posted January 5, 2007

This is the Raymarine ST60+ package mounted in a three-bay Navpod. I did not want to mount these in the usual place at the helm because the windvane does most of our steering and I like to sit forward. Thus I bought a six foot piece of 1” SS tubing from Defender, cut it with a standard tubing cutter, had it bent at a local canvas shop, and used standard Tyco t-fittings and 60 degree feet to mount it to the coachroof. The wiring is all internal to the pod and tubing; the hardest part was drilling two large holes in the tubing for the wires to pass through. The wiring goes through a hole in the coachroof under the starboard foot; the feet are bedded to the coachroof and the tubing so the whole thing is sealed. The instruments connect to the radar/chartplotter via Seatalk and share data, allowing true winds, VMG, and leeway to be calculated automatically. A matching RL70CRC in the nav station is used as a repeater for radar, chartplotter, and all the instrument readings. Only one CMAP NT+ cartridge is required; the two display heads share all data including the maps. The tiller autopilot is also on this seatalk bus and its display data is repeated on the RL70CRC.

If I had it to do over I’d mount the RL70CRC in a Navpod too to hide all the wires. Presently it mounts with the U-bracket that comes with the plotter, and the wiring goes through the coachroof on a series of four nylon cable clams. In my experience metal cable clams are useless, rotting in salt water after a few years. 

All the wiring comes into the coachroof above the aft cabin, where it travels above the overhead panels to the nav station bulkhead and then down the false channel in the bulkhead into the nav station. The one exception is the scanner cable, which stays in the overhead all the way to the mast step and then up the mast. There wasn’t enough scanner cable to route it the usual way through the compression post.

Charlie