Electrical gremlins strike on first cruise of the year

[Carpediem44DB]

We took our first cruise this weekend with our Yacht Club. Not five minutes from port the E120 display blinks off and then back on. I switch on the radar and find that its in-op. I restart the display and all data displays fine but it shuts down with in a few mins. I'm thinking its time for the old "Break Out Another Thousand" axiom. When we got to our destination and got settled I decided to check terminal connections, fuses and grounds for corrosion and signs of moisture. Sure enough, cleaning the fuse terminals and exercising the connections up on the radar mother board fixed everything! On the cruise home everything worked like new. I never really saw anything obvious, just some minor oxidation but that's all it takes some times. Thought I'd share in case anyone else has issues after the boat has sat idle over the winter.
Carpe Diem

 

[ttmott]

We took our first cruise this weekend with our Yacht Club. Not five minutes from port the E120 display blinks off and then back on. I switch on the radar and find that its in-op. I restart the display and all data displays fine but it shuts down with in a few mins. I'm thinking its time for the old "Break Out Another Thousand" axiom. When we got to our destination and got settled I decided to check terminal connections, fuses and grounds for corrosion and signs of moisture. Sure enough, cleaning the fuse terminals and exercising the connections up on the radar mother board fixed everything! On the cruise home everything worked like new. I never really saw anything obvious, just some minor oxidation but that's all it takes some times. Thought I'd share in case anyone else has issues after the boat has sat idle over the winter.
Carpe Diem

The length of cabling can play into problems as things age also. Similarly on my 52 the displays would decide to reboot and the radar would work sometimes then shut down and other times refuse to even start. All the troubleshooting revealed a faulty radar so I bought another core and after that didn't fix the situation I bought another complete radar unit and connected to the existing cabling; it operated just fine after the replacement then again started to show the same failure symptoms. We also checked all of the cabling and connections and it all tested within the Raymarine requirements. I even replaced the fuse block and all new fuses. In an act of despair I decided to pull the radar cable out of the boat; what I found out - in order for Sea Ray to remove the bridge for transport they provided electrical connectors at the bridge interface joint; great idea and a benefit for transport. However, in order to install a connector for the radar cable they added an extension cable, a 10 meter extension cable, 30 feet, and coiled all 10 meters up in the side of the bridge. There was so much extra cable I could connect to my dock neighbors radar two slips down from me. So, I removed that complete extension cable and still had enough length in the cable attached to the power tap to reach the radar unit; I cut off that cable's end connector and terminated it in the radar pedestal. The problem is gone, in fact the radar image ghosting is also gone. The only thing I don't have is a connector and 30 extra feet of cable...…
Just a thought for you to check out.....
Tom

 

[Espos4]

The extra cable length could be an issue, but also the fact that it was coiled up is a potential source of interference.

The signal can be affected by exterior sources as it travels through the harness. Coil up 30’ of wiring and the potential for interference greatly increases.