MikeBz
Well-Known Member
Our plotter stopped showing AIS targets towards the end of last season. Winter project…
With 12V applied the AIS receiver (Comar AIS-2-NMEA) did not illuminate its power LED. Comar were very helpful and suggested that short of buying a new unit (this one is no longer supported) I check a 500mA fuse on the circuit board. Sure enough it was open circuit, so replaced that and now with 12V applied the green power LED comes on and the 2 red comms LEDs come on for ~10s as per the installation instructions.
With unit installed back in the boat the e7 plotter shows ‘no AIS’ in its status bar. It looks to me as though with NMEA 0183 there is only one relevant sentence (!AIVDM) which the receiver transmits to the plotter. So am I right in thinking that if no AIS transmissions are received by the receiver then plotter will not be aware that an AIS receiver is connected?
On similar lines, the Lighthouse manual has instructions for enabling AIS which include going to System Settings->External Devices->AIS Unit Setup - but I don’t see AIS Unit Setup as an option. How would the plotter know to show this option if it can’t tell whether an AIS unit is actually connected?
The e7 manual says to connect the AIS receiver to port 1 (which has input/output) but in my case I’m pretty sure it’s connected to port 2 (input only) - I say pretty sure because the baud rates are set to 4800 for port 1 and 38400 for port 2, and the receiver is configured for 38400. I don’t see that matters since the AIS receiver won’t expect to receive sentences from the plotter, so a receive only port on the plotter should be OK? The configuration was working before the fuse in the receiver failed.
With 12V applied the AIS receiver (Comar AIS-2-NMEA) did not illuminate its power LED. Comar were very helpful and suggested that short of buying a new unit (this one is no longer supported) I check a 500mA fuse on the circuit board. Sure enough it was open circuit, so replaced that and now with 12V applied the green power LED comes on and the 2 red comms LEDs come on for ~10s as per the installation instructions.
With unit installed back in the boat the e7 plotter shows ‘no AIS’ in its status bar. It looks to me as though with NMEA 0183 there is only one relevant sentence (!AIVDM) which the receiver transmits to the plotter. So am I right in thinking that if no AIS transmissions are received by the receiver then plotter will not be aware that an AIS receiver is connected?
On similar lines, the Lighthouse manual has instructions for enabling AIS which include going to System Settings->External Devices->AIS Unit Setup - but I don’t see AIS Unit Setup as an option. How would the plotter know to show this option if it can’t tell whether an AIS unit is actually connected?
The e7 manual says to connect the AIS receiver to port 1 (which has input/output) but in my case I’m pretty sure it’s connected to port 2 (input only) - I say pretty sure because the baud rates are set to 4800 for port 1 and 38400 for port 2, and the receiver is configured for 38400. I don’t see that matters since the AIS receiver won’t expect to receive sentences from the plotter, so a receive only port on the plotter should be OK? The configuration was working before the fuse in the receiver failed.
