Thread: Sonar wiring

Use this ... It's made for marine environments ...

Marine Grade Wire Duplex DC, Tinned Copper USA Made Boat Wiring

Rickie

I personally like to use twisted pair wires as an additional guard against interference. This has never officially caught on .... but twisted pair wiring creates a natural "choke." Using twisted wire VS no twisted can make a phenomenal difference in preventing interference from being introduced thru the power wiring.

I use individual wires and twist them together with a drill.

Originally Posted by BobB

I personally like to use twisted pair wires as an additional guard against interference. This has never officially caught on .... but twisted pair wiring creates a natural "choke." Using twisted wire VS no twisted can make a phenomenal difference in preventing interference from being introduced thru the power wiring.

I use individual wires and twist them together with a drill.

I do this with all my electronic wiring and have never had an interference problem.

Twist pair invented by Alexander Graham Bell specifically for noise canceling characteristics (crosstalk and external induced EMI).

Could cat5 wire be used to run power to sonar units? Even though the wire is thin, usually 22Ga or so, the pairs could be wired together to carry enough current to run the unit.

Look up the CMA (Circular Mil Area) of the cat5 and compare it to the CMA of what you would normally use (like maybe 18gauge). Add the CMA of each paralleled cat5 and see how close it is to the 18ga CMA. This is a ball park figure of the parallel wire ampacity. Other things do come in to play. Like open air vs enclosed, etc.

Originally Posted by Cane Pole

Look up the CMA (Circular Mil Area) of the cat5 and compare it to the CMA of what you would normally use (like maybe 18gauge). Add the CMA of each paralleled cat5 and see how close it is to the 18ga CMA. This is a ball park figure of the parallel wire ampacity. Other things do come in to play. Like open air vs enclosed, etc.

If your cat5 is 24 ga the conductors add up to 1616 mils - about the same as 18Ga which is 1624 mils. So if you were to tie all the solid color wires - Blue, Orange, Green & Brown together and all the wires with White tracers together you would have ample ampacity to run most sonars, if my math and the data I looked up is correct. My only "yah-but" is all the cat5 I have seen is solid wire, which would not take a lot of vibration before failing. I see that there is stranded conductor cat5 but all that I have is solid.

Another option is to run a length of RG-8X which is a coaxial cable with a 16Ga center conductor and a braided shield. One step further is to use two runs of RG-8X, use the center conductors as the power leads and tie the shields together and ground them to the hull of the boat if aluminum to reduce interference. Even without grounding them to the hull as in a fiberglass boat it would go a long way to lessen any interference from entering the cable along the run.

Cat 5 also comes in stranded wire. I needed a long run, small amp wires for my pontoon. I just doubled the pairs in a underwater camera cable to supply the electronic circuits in the troll motor lift and control circuit on my pontoon (aft). The cable was handy so I used it.