Review on Enhance Your Marine Experience with Blue Sea Systems BelowDeck Panels: Dual USB Chargers, 12V Sockets, and Mini OLED Monitors by Wayne Drakh

First, the unit I received looks exactly as listed. This is not a 12V outlet that has a USB power adapter plugged into it. The USB ports and the power converter itself are a black, conformally coated module inside the cylinder that you see and install. For use in marine environments, this coating is important as there is no other good way to protect electronic circuits from moisture than to seal them tightly and use waterproof input and output connectors. So, with the exception of exposed connector pins on the device, salty air shouldn't have a major negative impact on long-term reliability. I bought this to power a Bluetooth to RS232 adapter for my race car's Megasquirt controller and a Nexus10 tablet that I use for the instrument. group on the same machine. The Nexus will not charge above 500mA with this power connector until I short the data pins on one of the USB connectors as described by Mr. Boroski. I had to do this on multiple USB power ports to get over 500mA. There is a newer performance specification for the USB charge port that requires devices plugged into the charge port to simply increase the current draw until the USB voltage drops below 5V in order to find and use the maximum current available such a connection can provide. I don't own any that do this yet, but I have a few Android devices that detect shorted data pins. I power this USB power port (and hence the Nexus and Bluetooth adapter) separately from the race car's ignition switch to reduce the time it takes to have fully functional gauges when starting the engine. Since the starting current drawn when cranking the engine lowers the available battery voltage, and I'm using the smallest (and lightest) battery I can afford to start the car, I wanted to know how well this power connector would perform during voltage dips during that time . I've found that the connector remains fully functional with input voltages as low as 6V, while the USB connector's outputs remain a constant 5V until the input voltage drops to almost 5V, because the switching noise on the input power line completely disappears (and the green LED goes out, but the regulated 5V output remains unchanged until the input voltage drops below 6 V. This performance is more than sufficient since my system voltage on the car does not drop below 9V during startup when my Battery has a decent charge as I've seen some similar devices cut off at 9V and the outputs have dropped to zero volts Because I've connected several unshielded analog sensor signals x to the ECU and I'm using Bluetooth to connect the ECU to it to connect to the Nexus/Dashboard, I was concerned about electrical noise generation from the device, either from the device in d ie the air or radiated from the 5V outputs or the 12V input. I did not find any noticeable noise on the 5 outputs B as seen on o'sco 350MHz. pe or with a 140-900 MHz handheld ham radio transceiver tuned to scan this band (actually several bands in this band, with some frequencies not tunable). The 12V input exhibits a 300kHz triangle wave with a short 1MHz ringing timed to the triangular peaks. The 300kHz triangle wave is under 0.2Vpp, and the 1MHz ringing is under 0.4Vpp. For some combinations of input voltage (7.5-15V) and load (0-1A tested), the ringing and triangle wave will decrease or disappear completely. At least one reviewer wrote that his sample generated enough noise at the 5V output that the noise emitted interfered with his marine radio reception. Based on how mine is behaving I would suspect it is defective or it is a different product than what I have. I found that a medium sized ferrite clamp with a power wire running through it and a 6800uF 25v electrolytic between the input terminals of the power connector eliminated this from the 12v wire back to the power switch.