Van Damme Marine
3,600METRES
Van Damme’s involvement in specialised Marine cables began in 2002 with the mega-yacht MV Octopus. Built for Microsoft co-founder and keen musician Paul Allen at a cost of around $250 million, the vessel featured an on board recording studio originally fitted with a Solid State Logic Axiom console.
Shipping Insurance criteria required the audio cabling required to meet the marine cabling standard IEC 60092 pt. 359 Electrical Installations in ships – Sheathing materials for shipboard power and communication cables. Van Damme manufactured several kilometres of Blue Series Analogue Audio and Green Series AES/EBU Digital Audio multicores for the project, using the compliant Low Smoke Zero Halogen (LSZH) SHF1 jacket material polymer – still the LSZH material of choice for most Van Damme cables.
In the years that followed Van Damme were involved in many other Super Yacht projects, and in conjunction with one of the world’s top Audio Visual technical consultancies, developed a dedicated Marine cabling range, as well as producing standard IEC 60092 pt. 359 compliant LSZH cables such as the Digilog signal cable and Ecoflex speaker cable ranges.
The Marine range included a 3 way RG6 video/satellite feed multicore (SeaSat) and specialist hybrid multicores that combined Category 5E (SeaCat) and Category 6 (Super Marine) data cables with OM3 multimode fibres, allowing AV infrastructure cables to be installed in a fraction of the time compared to pulling multiple individual cables. The continuing migration of AV technologies to copper and fibre network based protocols, technological advances and the increased bandwidth available in cabling infrastructure led to these cables being removed from standard stock in 2016, and they are now available to special order.
Van Damme continue to supply audio, video and data cables to the Marine Audio Visual market, and the vessels that feature Van Damme on board read like a Super Yacht Who’s Who: Meduse (now called Athena III), Twizzle, Dream, Tatoosh, Gu and of course MV Octopus, where it all started…
WHAT PRODUCTS
WERE USED
3,600METRES
Van Damme Super Marine
4 x Cat 6 4 x OM3 Fibre