PAS-Thru Box, a NMEA 0183 necessity?

I first heard about it at NavaGear, immediately contacted developer Paul Shirley about a sample, and now am an extremely pleased PAS-Thru Box user. You may already have read my whining about NMEA 0183 wiring difficulties. Many boats these days are spider-webbed with fine gauge wires carrying important data; they’re painful to install and often end up way too vulnerable to damage, not to mention poorly documented and hard to modify. Well, I don’t know how the Box could do more to remedy these problems. Those orange spring tabs above (bigger photo here) are powerful and purportedly gas tight.

The little red jumpers make it easy to feed an 0183 output to 2 or 3 inputs. And the spaciousness of the Box (this is the smaller model), plus its rubber-lined shrink-fit glands (I got the two black ones from a local marine supply house) make it easy to protect all those fine wires from abuse. Finally, Capt. Shirley has not only created an informative PAS-Thru Web site, but also  Excel templates for planning a data network and recording the results. That’s a useful download even if you don’t buy a Box, which may seem a little dear even at West Marine prices. However, I think a PAS-Thru can earn its keep just in installation ease for many set ups, and the value of later hassles avoided could be huge. (Of course, the NMEA 2000 plug’n’play multi talker/listener system is another way to avoid all these hassles.)