TL;DR - I saved about $250 on a single item when replacing the defective AIRMAR transducer in my Yamaha jet boat with an equally valid but "non-OEM" option.
Hopefully this helps someone... In my 2015 242 Ltd S, the transducer went bad. Read about how I came to that conclusion via
this post.
This particular post is to document how I replaced my Yamaha transducer (F2D-U8K1W-01-00) with an identical AIRMAR transducer for half the price of the Yamaha OEM part. (Retail $697.99, Boats.net currently $505 and backordered with no estimated ship date available)
Bought
this AIRMAR DT800 transducer for $263, shipped. This proved to be identical to the one in my boat, minus the connector difference. The Yamaha version has the connector that connects the transducer seamlessly to the house umbilical wiring, providing N2K connection thru the SPU to the Connext system.
In case you are wondering, NMEA 2000 wiring is as follows. This corresponds to the pinouts on the Yamaha connector for the AIRMAR transducer, except there is no pin for shielding. My supposition is that Yamaha decided to not implement shielding in their minor N2K backbone.
Red—Positive Voltage
Black—Negative Voltage
White—NMEA +
Blue—NMEA -
Bare—Shield
I did not want to void the warranty of my brand new transducer by cutting the end of the cable off, so I created a pigtail by lopping a foot or so off the prior transducer cable, and buying an
N2K patch cable off Amazon. This cable cost me $22.57 shipped, Amazon prime. Add some 3:1 heat shrink adhesive tubing and some marine tinned copper crimp connectors w/ 3:1 integrated heat shrink adhesive tubing, all of which I had in shop supply from prior boat projects, I have about $25 invested in this pigtail. The final pigtail is shown here. The build photos follow.
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First, I dummy proofed my cutting by attaching the new N2K cable to my new transducer. Shown below. Again I totally could have lopped off the end of the new transducer cable and spliced in the Yamaha connector directly, but that would have voided the transducer's two year warranty. I would rather spend $20 to have a pigtail that allows me to just screw on a new transducer, than have to ever do this connector splicing game again, and likewise lose the transducer warranty.
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I then proceeded to lop off a foot of cable from the old transducer, and likewise lopped one of the ends off my new N2K cable from Amazon. Cutting open both cables, you can see they are each color coded for easy wiring. Nice. Again, I provided the details above in case you require further troubleshooting, but you could have done this wiring without knowing red meant DC+. Red goes to Red. Oh well, I like to know how things work.
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I spliced them together, and heat shrinked them.
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Connected to the new transducer, and tested in the boat. Worked great. Depth comm error went away, got a temp reading, and low depth alarm. Good! Considering I have the transducer still sitting on the floor of my boat..
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Another
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Heat shrink tubing over top... 1/2" worked for me.. I put the 1/2 inch tubing on each side of the pigtail wires before splicing, as they would not fit over the connectors on either side. (Do this BEFORE you wire it up!). The last piece was a 3/4 inch tubing that I placed over top in the end to seal the two 1/2" ones together. I found it useful to step up in sizes of heat shrink even though I'm using 3:1 due to the way I did the connections being so much larger than the cable diameters.
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Final complete kit:
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BTW, here's a pic of the new transducer:
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And the old:
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