Wind and depth display freezing

Poey50

Poey50

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OK - having sorted my AIS problem with the help of some of the forum's finest, onto the next one.

Two weeks ago, on passage from Portsmouth to Chichester over a fairly shallow area (about 2-3m below keel), I was struck by the consistency of the depth and the speed. It took a while to dawn on me that this was because the display was frozen. Even restarting the unit (Raymarine mn 100 dual digital wireless) made no difference. After about thirty minutes of it all being switched off back on the mooring it worked again.

On Tuesday, I switched on for a trip back from Bembridge and the depth display was frozen at 0.5m. However this time the speed reading was unaffected. Restarting the unit and restarting the power supply to the hull transmitter and transducer (Ampair DST800) made no difference.

Over winter I added a Raymarine Micro-talk Gateway to the system to use wind data with the tiller pilot but I don't know if that has had any effect.

Any thoughts on tracking down this glitch?
 
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First step in the diagnosis, IMHO, is to find out if there are correct NMEA0183 sentences being sent. It's basically RS232 in older versions or 422 in later so not too difficult to make up something to intercept and read the messages if you have nothing already.

Once you know whether there are sentences to be read or not you can focus on the display or the senders.
 
lpdsn said:
First step in the diagnosis, IMHO, is to find out if there are correct NMEA0183 sentences being sent. It's basically RS232 in older versions or 422 in later so not too difficult to make up something to intercept and read the messages if you have nothing already.

Once you know whether there are sentences to be read or not you can focus on the display or the senders.
Click to expand...

Hmm ... I wouldn't know where to start, I'm afraid.
 
Poey50 said:
Hmm ... I wouldn't know where to start, I'm afraid.
Click to expand...

OK.

What do you have connected together? I've assumed NMEA0183 but that may not have been valid. Do you have anything that will allow you to read messages. One of those cheap NMEA -> Wireless -> Tablet connections perhaps?
 
Poey50 said:
This is the system that came with the boat ...

https://seamarknunn.com/acatalog/ta...-depth-system-with-triducer-8694.html#SID=547
Click to expand...

Ah TackTicks. I was leading you up the wrong path with NMEA0183. So it's the wireless connectivity that seems to be dropping out from time to time. I raced on two boats with those and they both had problems. One was put down to the boat being carbon. On the second we found it was manageable by insisting crew turned all phones off. The suspicion was that Bluetooth was causing the problems. That was all before Raymarine took them over but I guess the fundamentals of the design are the same.

Make sure the units are charged up enough and if one freezes see if it is helped by moving it closer to the transmitter temporarily.
 
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