"Bill Kearney" wrote in
t:

The last thing I want when I jump in the boat after a long
work week is to discover some cheapie consumer-grade device has gotten
corroded and shorted out my electrical system in an attempt to save
itself. But coming a close second is not getting reamed paying for
"marine" stuff. Especially when it's tweaked to be proprietary.


Wouldn't that be nice? But, let's look at the, so called, marine stuff.
A plastic box with cheap screw terminals you can buy at any Radio Shack
inside it on two little plastic pins not even screwed to the box. That
accurately describes a Raymarine Seatalk Junction Box.

A potted-so-noone-can-ever-fix-it epoxy box with cheap screw terminals
sticking up through the plastic from the PC board in the potting to hook
your tiny wires to. That accurately describes a Noland NMEA multiplexer.
It's not even in a protective plastic box. Ours is stuck to the cabinet
its in behind the helm with velcro because there's no way to mount it
otherwise.

An open chassis with many holes in it made out of painted aluminum. The
holes are open so cooling air can be drawn into the box to cool the
transmitter, the sea air being drawn over every unprotected PC board and
component, none of which are "potted" to protect them, and spit out
another hole on the other side. Cheap little plastic connectors with
very fragile pins and no seals of any kind, hardly any kind of locking
device to keep it from simply falling apart connects its vital control
cable to the reasonably-nicely-sealed remote antenna tuner. This
accurately describes the "marine SSB" the Icom M802, the flagship HF
radio of Icom's Marine Line.

A zinc-potmetal box, easily converted to zinc oxide, loosely covering
vital, unprotected PC boards inside it, but left with gaping holes in it
so the cheapest of direct-board-connector-pins can connect it to its
chinzy, unsealed control/data/power cable. Its main DC power supplied by
pushing the raw wires into a clamp held open against its spring by your
screwdriver. The potmetal box is mounted inside a big plastic case with
a cursory rubber seal, but only held together by FOUR little screws that
cannot pinch the rubber seal shut without cracking the cheap plastic the
box is made of with screws so far apart. Matters not, in the bottom of
the unsealed plastic box, there is a rubber drain inside one of the
little plastic compartments caused by the plastic "stringers" that
stiffen the plastic enough to support the units internal weight. The sun
and outside air temperature insure wet air is pumped in and out of the
cabinet...in at dusk when the dew forms on the inside of the plastic box
that turned cold when the sun went down...and out without draining the
water out of the flat-bottomed, compartmentalized box, in the heat of the
day. The humidity of the inside of this box is 100% at 100F or more all
day long. Everything in the box rots, rusts, corrodes and the potmetal
main chassis is eaten by the daily rainstorm like the inside of an empty
metal gas tank. This accurately describes the 2KW radome of a "marine"
Raymarine radar scanner. I've gone through THREE.

None of the so-called "marine" AM-FM-CD players is any different from the
car version with the completely open chassis, except it has a white front
panel instead of black. Marine my ass.

Amazingly expensive cabin fans made in China and monikered with
impressive names like Hella that don't even have a fan guard to keep the
kids fingers safe, mounted with a steel screw through a plastic base with
the cheapest motors on the planet. Marine or "consumer"?

Marine panel instruments you just KNOW are going to get splashed that
always leak past the glass to fog up the inside of the instrument so you
can't read it on a cold morning. Marine or consumer??

Just some examples. Equipment sold to yachtsmen aren't any different
than equipment sold to CBers or home entertainment customers.....

It's all crap.