Delivery successfully completed.

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TheBoatman

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Well the yacht is safely delivered to the Hamble - I'll post something more about it later, but what was interesting, was the GPS suffering what can best be described as a "botty burp" halfway between Brighton and The Owers.

The boat has Raymarine ST60 electronics with everything talking to everything else - the autohelm was running and was in "track" mode when all of a sudden alarms started to go off and we got a "no data" warning.

I was running a track on a paper chart as well so gave the helmsman a course to steer whilst we tried to sort out the problem - after 1 min or so it reacquired a fix and off we went again - no probs.

I can only think that for some reason all gps signals were lost for a couple of secs?

Did anyone else suffer a gps signal loss at about 11.40hrs on Friday?

Peter.
 
[ QUOTE ]
I can only think that for some reason all gps signals were lost for a couple of secs?

Did anyone else suffer a gps signal loss at about 11.40hrs on Friday?


[/ QUOTE ]

That'll be them damned sunspots!
 
Happens to me regularly when the sun is shining and someone is sitting propped up in a corner of the pushpit - the gps ariel makes a great handhold!! Seems that GPS signals can't get through flesh and bone. Could this have been the case for you? Sorry if this spoils the sun spot theories.
 
If it was the ST60 stuff whining away then I'm not surprised ... it'd be interesting to know how the GPS data is fed into sea-talk on this boat. I've long been suspicious that my ST60 multi instrument (where the GPS is fed into) can't cope on occasions and temporarily loses the plot. The GPS itself doesn't lose fix.

oops ... congrats getting the boat back ...
 
It sounds like the Seatalk system may have momentarily had a hiccup in sending data around the instruments, it could do that even if the GPS was still going fine. We have one GPS linked into our ST50s system and it does happen, the NO DATA alarm goes on the ST50s (we have a Navdata repeater in the string as well as the autopilot head also displaying nav details). However the cockpit plotter has an integral GPS and it has never happened on that, so again pointing to Seatalk data transfer being the culprit.

What REALLY bugs me though is that our ST6001 autopilot will switch to 'standby' from time to time unasked! Sometimes there are 3 beeps from below (where there is a 2nd pilot control, a multi, and the GPS/plotter that feeds the Seatalk) but oft times no beeps at all. Our boat is very well balanced and it can sometimes go quite a way before we even notice George has taken a pee break! Sometimes it will go 18-24 hours of continuous use without doing it, other times (fortunately rare) it will go 3 times in an hour and it happens under sail or power. We also occasionally get the 3 beeps warning when it is already on standby and isn't even operational but I've never been quick enough to see which instrument beeped or if an error message came up. Raymarine poltergeist!
 
We have a similar setup, ST60's, 6001, autopilot.
We had an ongoing problem with this type of error and eventually got to the bottom of it by having the 3 x wind instruments firmware upgraded.
This was found by AW Marine in Haslar Marina...

Since then all has been ok...
 
Para
There was no one sitting near the gps aerial and when I went below the Raytheon chart plotter had gone "off line" because it didn't have a fix.

The auto helm was relying on the gps to send it steering data but that was momentarily lost - hence the alarms and confusion. But as I said within a minute or so the gps fired up again and got a fix and all returned to normal - although I did keep a close eye on it for the rest of the trip.

An interesting point was that although the gps/chart plotter dropped out completely it didn't forget that it was on a passage and allowed me to carry on - even though I had to bush up on the method of pressing the right buttons to get it to re-start from where the ship was - "follow route from here" was the button to press.

You live and learn.

Peter.
 
Can't really say what model it was as it's not my boat but it was a 3 year old 10" Raytheon colour jobby.

Knowing the owner it would have been the DB's of chart plotters available at the time - he also specified an up-graded autohelm that could handle a 45' boat in seriously iffy conditions. This was proved on the trip as we rounded the N. Foreland in NW F8 with them helm steering quite happily under a 105% genny and 2 reefs in the main - we were stomping on a bit at 14 knts.

The red hot "Ginsters" Cornish pasties went down well too!!!!

Peter.
 
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