Boat Electrician Help

[Off Course]

I replaced the old clarion source unit in my boat with a new M475 clarion, everything was working fine for the last 3 weeks when all of a sudden the stereo stopped working....OK lets find the problem, oh no it's not that easy, the unit has 3 wires for power, a yellow wire very thick that clarion calls a memory lead hooked straight to the battery, a black wire ground that is wired to a block of grounds behind my steering council, and a thin red wire that is hooked to my ignition switch that powers the unit on when the switch is in accessory mode, very straight forward, the problem is, that the unit just sits there and blinks on and off repeatedly and thats it, so I hooked the black wire up to the negative post of a spare battery, and the yellow and red wires to the positive post and it works beautiful, so I thought to bypass all my installed boat wiring and ran new wires accross the birth from the radio to the ground block and to the ignition switch and the dam thing just sits there and blinks on and off, so it"s not the wires what the "H" is going on here?:huh:

 

[Asureyez]

When you get working to non working ... what is happening with intermittent power up smells like a bad power connections, broken lead wrong lead connections absence of speakers, etc. The system is cutting out from an internal fault protection. The radio boots up, sees trouble and protects itself and shuts down, waits and tries again ... etc., or the radio has developed a internal fault. That it works fine with directly connected says its the wiringand that the wiring worked correctly and now doesn't leads us to a short or power supply issue.

Radio's have two separate power lead (supply). One to keep the preset channel favorites alive. If the unit goes down totally, your presets would disappear. So you have a low power consumption hot lead to to keep your rock from your roll, that is the direct connect to the ships house batteries. Then there is the operating lead that is switched (and fused).

Are you absolutely certain you have your polarities correct?

Are you sure your memory lead is correctly connected vs. main power?

Is your ground properly connected (some systems switch the ground).

If those are correct the next stop is the switched power and any in line fuse AND 12V panel breaker. Are your leads all connected with solid terminal ends of some design, are any old connections dirty (dirty or grease coated spade connectors are common on radios). If you have a block connector, try cable ties to keep the block tightly connected. You stated this was a marine radio, but if the wiring is of simple non zinc coated twisted strand (typical non marine radio fare), when wrapped around a terminal lug can easily short from just one errant strand, or can have many broken strands in the bundle. Twisting stresses the strands and can break just inside the insulation causing insufficient current to be carried. This condition can cause internal over heating in the unit when it tires to draw more than it can get through the "pipe."

In general, if you are certain the leads are run correctly, then trace the connections for the old system making sure you are clean, tight and ship shape and your breakers are matched to the new load.

Finally, but perhaps first in line is do you have enough ships power to run the beast you've bought. Some of these radios draw so much power to drive the mega watt speakers the batteries can be overwhelmed with the draw. When there is no charging source on line, older batteries can give it up quickly.

(I digress here: While not your case, we'll see this in cars where 2-5000 watt 12v systems can demand 400 Amps in a heart beat! Systems won't start up until the car is running or the car won't start. Some of these guys have to install HCAP alternators and separate radio battery banks to get their WHIP to boost, know what I mean ?)

 

[JR861]

A low voltage situation (ie a run down battery, or bad power connection) will cause the unit to power up and shut down with it's internal fault protection.