after working more then 10 years without any problem, my furuno MFDBB black box stopped working. For a couple of days, I could restart it for a few minutes, but now no more signal after booting.
Pochon (the company that installs all instruments for AMEL ) suggested be to replace the hardware with the new TZT3 display 12 inches at the cockpit and the TZT2 black box at the chart table to keep the existing screen.

Has anyone already done this upgrade? In what problems did you run? I heard that I might need a interface for the radar and some  NMEA 183 - 2000 converter (Hydra 3000, GPS). Also the TZT3 display in the cockpit has some different dimensions than the old MFD12. It does look a litte complicated (tranfer of the charts to the new system can only be done by furuno etc..)

Any experiece or suggestion would be helpful!

Ralph
Santa Isabella currently located in northern Italy.
A54 #144

 

Hi Ralph,

I replaced the Navnet 3D BB system with the latest Furuno gizmos.
The good news is you don’t need a TZT3 plotter for in the cockpit. The TZ2BB can control 2 displays independently. So I replaced the MFD in the cockpit with a touchscreen monitor and a Furuno control pad in case you don't want to use the touchscreen. This saves power. This was for me the main reason to replace the Navnet3D. The latter is very power hungry.
What I also did is replace the two NAvPilot computers with the 700 series. For this you need to by the computer and the operating console only, the rest can be re-used. The 700-series is compatible with the TZ2 using NEMA-2000.
I also decided to replace the 4 B&G instruments with Furuno FI70s giving you much more options on displayed data (like tue wind information). I kept the B&G CPU and graphic displays. They still provide the speed/depth/wind data.

In short what you need is:
- TZ2 Black Box
- Radar power supply
- Shipmodul programmable NMEA converter
- Conversion set for the inside Furuno control console
- Conversion set for inside display to make it touchscreen
- Active HDMI extension cables and active USB extension cables
- NMEA 2000 cables and joints

There is more but let me know if you need the details as it is quite an extensive conversion.

In the end you may want to consider to move to another brand altogether. But because of the Radardome and the AIS transceiver that may give you a comparable price tag in the end. I know of one A54 that did a full B&G conversion and he spend about 20k$ on it. My conversion was much less but I saved a lot on using a few secondhand parts. Occasionally Ebay can offer nice deals on parts that were taken off boats from people that have more money then brains and always want the very latest.

Kind regards,

Arno Luijten
SV Luna,
A54-121