Updating stereo on boat 228

[TIDE]

Had a great weekend installing the new stereo stuff. Had some surprises both good and bad.

bad surprise is I found out this morning how to get it all worked . Good surprise is my boat had a Garmin NEMA backbone installed already. You might ask ,how in the heck did you not that Bob? Well, when I bought the boat I had the dealer install all the electronics.

So,when got the Garmin GXM 54 receiver all I had to do is remove an old Nema 2000 GPS antenna and replace it with the GXM antenna. I had to add a Garmin Network expander to add the XM weather functionality along with my radar .

The speaker install went well as well as the Fusion Apollo mx 670 any where receiver. I ended up mounting it up top in the ebox to connect into the Garmin Nema backbone. I had issues with subscribing to XM and it turns out I had to get better view of the sky . Also , once I solved that issue I had no audio .

Fusion has crummy instructions. You drive the system through an AP on the phone.. my fishing buddy Ben loaded the AP on his phone and turned a bunch on Inputs or sources to on. I could not get FM or XM or anything to play other than the blue tooth. This morning I got this Epiphany of sorts and went into the AP and turned all sources off but XM. Voila success! Out came 80s on 8 and Don't you forget about me!

The speakers sound great if not amazing and the built in class D amp in the Fusion with it's 280 watts of peak power is more than enough for the boat . The JL7.7s mostly fit,we had to trim some of the insulation on the fish boxes to get them to fit well. The sound is again solid , especially for a boat. I highly recommend the Fusion head unit and the JL speakers .

Curious to how much insulation you had to trim on the fish boxes. I tried to get the 6.5 JLs to fit and it just wasn’t working after trimming some.

 

[BigD808]

Ended up ditching the inspection plate idea completely, wouldn’t fit in that area no matter how hard I tried. Ended up fabbing some “speaker plates” out of starboard under the gunnel area. I wanted to get the speaker tight as possible to the walk around step up. Anyway still in the mock up stage, but here’s a few pics. I plan on GE almond siliconing every joint in hopes to not have any rattling problems.

 

[BigD808]

Plates finalized, upgraded under gunnel lighting to lumitec.