Looking for WS 200

Hello Randy,
Furuno USA no longer sells the WS200. Airmar makes the WS200, they sell it under the name PB200. You can buy this unit from most Furuno dealers as they are usually Airmar dealers as well. Here is a link to our dealers, http://www.furunousa.com/Support/DealerLocator.aspx, and Airmar’s marine products distributor Gemeco, mailto:sales@gemeco.com.


Best regards,
Birdman
 
Birdman: is there a reason the PB200 is no longer being sold by Furuno? And is a replacement product available/in the wings?
rgds
aquabelle
 
Hello,
The only reason Furuno USA stopped selling the WS200 is because we could not sell it at a competitive price. You can buy a PB200 for close to what Furuno USA was paying for a WS200. Include product support, shipping, and possible warranty replacements and we were losing money on every WS200 sold. Since we were not the only company selling that product, it was decided that we would discontinue it. The PB200 is the same exact sensor as the WS200. The only difference is that we had a couple of output sentences in the WS200 turned off as a default. As of today I do not have any info that Airmar is developing a replacement for the PB200. The PB200 is still a current product.

Best regards,
Birdman
 
Birdman, I have a Furuno MFD 12, Hub 101 and DRS2 Radar. Do I need any extra cables to connect the PB200 to the NEMA 2000 connection on the DRS 2? What will it mean to me not having those "sentences" turned off, as in the Furuno WS200, when I connect the PB 200 to my radar? FYI, I will be using the information from the PB200 to feed MaxSea Explorer.

Thank you,

Randy
 
Hello Randy,
We turned off the heading sentence, because in our opinion the Furuno PG500, PG700, and the SC30 are more accurate. We wanted our customers to use the heading info coming from one of these devises and not from the WS200 (PB200). If you have another heading device on your boat, you will now have two sources you can select in the MFD12 installation menu. If you connect the PB200 to the DRS12 you will need to make a small NMEA 2000 backbone, topside. A backbone consists of a 120ohm terminating resistor on both ends. In this case, the DRS dome antenna could be one end of the backbone (a 120ohm resistor comes with the dome installation materials). The other end of the backbone would be a power T-connector with a terminating connector on one side of the T, and the cable supplied with the PB200 connected to the other side of the T (the PB200 side would be the drop). Or you can get an optional PB200 cable. This optional cable would have a terminating resistor in the end of the connector that attaches to the PB200, see page 17 of the PB200 installation instructions, http://www.airmartechnology.com/airmar2 ... age=Marine. If you are not familiar with NMEA 20000 here is a link to the Furuno Can bus design guide, http://www.furunousa.com/ProductDocumen ... Design.pdf. NMEA2000 is for all practical purposes, a can bus.

Hope this info helps,
Birdman
 
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