T&T: Airmar PB100 Weather Station

[Frank Osborne]

Frank,
We just installed a PB100 on our boat this winter as part of a major 
electronics upgrade. We have it connected to 2 Furuno RD-30 displays 
(one in the pilothouse and one in the stateroom at the head of the bed) 
and our laptop running Coastal Explorer (CE) via  the airmar combiner 
box. The combiner box acts as a NMEA multiplexer so you can connect the 
PB100 to multiple readers(pc, chartplotter, & digital displays like the 
RD-30). The PB100 not only includes almost any kind of weather data you 
can imagine, it's also has a GPS (WAAS) and compass heading that you can 
use as a backup or, as in our case, to drive CE on our pc and CE can 
display the wind and other NMEA data from the PB100. We also installed 
an Airmar SmartSensor transducer with speed, depth, and temp that plugs 
into the PB100 combiner box so at anchor all we need to run is the PB100 
to give us depth, anchor, and wind alarms. That way we do not need to 
run any of the larger Furuno electronics to give depth or gps location. 
We have two other fixed GPS's, one driving the Furuno chartplotters and 
radars and the other gps connected to the DSC in the VHF and SSB radios. 
With a central wiring point, if one gps fails we can easily rewire one 
of the other 2 gps's to the priority electronics.

While the PB100 might seem expensive to you (I don't think it is) you 
get a lot of capabilities with it. We don't have a lot of hours on it 
yet but it seems to be a quality built product.
 
-- 
Frank Osborne
Discovery N46-37
Home Port: Anacortes, WA


Frank Burrows wrote:
> Anyone with any experience with an Airmar PB100 ?