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Larry Larry is offline
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First recorded activity by BoatBanter: Jul 2006
Posts: 5,275
Default Raymarine product horrors

wrote in news:72b65baa-83e6-4cb1-95b8-
:

The E120 product has MASSIVE shortcomings


Aboard S/V "Lionheart", an Amel Sharki 41, the Raymarine suite is older:
2KW radome up 40' on forward side of mizzen fixed radar mount.
RL70CRC display/chart plotter
Raystar 120 GPS Seatalk
Raymarine Smart Heading Sensor (gyro-compass) Seatalk
with Raymarine Compass sensor Seatalk very near centerline.

We have a full line of chart plugs for the RL70, but quit wasting money
updating them as the the owner's boss has a huge superyacht with a
subscription to The Cap'n chart CDs of the whole planet regularly
updated. His old CDs show up on Lionheart..(c; We use a legal copy of
The Cap'n on a Dell Latitude notebook running off a wifi router.
Ethernet services for the NMEA 0183 network come from a Serial port to
Ethernet converter made for industrial apps called a WebFoot. Virtual
SErial port software, that comes with the WebFoot, fools The Cap'n into
thinking it's talking to an old COM port the laptop no longer has. You
can operate, totally wireless, anywhere on the boat from the bow to the
stern, even from the beach within about 200 yards over the wifi link.

At the chart table, I salvaged a Yeoman portable paper chart plotter
from my owner's trash and removed the boards from the destroyed foam lap
mount (he left it in his truck in the sun in Atlanta and it MELTED! The
plotter is stuck to the bottom of the chart table mahogany lid and turns
the chart table into an automatic paper chart plotter from the system
data using the Yeoman's position puck like the big ships..(c; A paper
trail backup is kept every hour at sea with it. The Yeoman can also be
used to paper plot a course with its puck and its waypoints show up on
every chart plotter, and The Cap'n on the computer at the click of the
button on the puck.

Sailing instruments on the boat are B&G "Network" PILOT - SPEED - WIND -
DATA (repeater at the nav station) linked to a port on our Noland NMEA
multiplexer. We chose to use Network instruments, now obsolete, because
many of them were already aboard the boat at purchase. (The old owner
got him a new Maramu we drooled over.)

Backup GPS is a Garmin 185 GPS/Chart plotter/Fishfinder we use for
charting the bottom. A switch selects which of the two GPSes feeds the
network....bringing me to my question to you.....

Is there ONLY ONE GPS receiver attached to your Raymarine network in the
video?

I ask this because IF our system can see BOTH GPS receiver outputs,
which DO differ in their fix, it caused the SAME POSITION JUMPING YOUR
VIDEO SHOWS as the system first get Fix A then Fix B from more than one
GPS source. My system switch only allows the NMEA network to see ONE
GPS at a time because of this. All chart plotters went crazy like yours
with two.

Your system jumping looks to me as if the system is seeing TWO GPS data
streams, simultaneously from two GPS receivers.....

The rest of it is simply inexcusable at this price point. The Cap'n
with nice fresh charts works superb! We even have our Automatic
Information System (AIS) plotting on it, in realtime, with full AIS data
on each ship.