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Gordon January 29th 08 07:54 PM

Raymarine product horrors
 
wrote:
On Jan 29, 9:14 am, GeoffSchultz
wrote:
Once again I will state that you need to look at the system as a
whole. ...


It seems quite possible that the refresh and positioning problems
could be a result of network issues. A bad cable or connection or a
faulty talker could be overwhelming the network with bad packets.
This happens on LANs all the time and is one of the potential
downsides of networked instrument systems.

... As far as RayMarine tech support, I have always found
them very reasonable to deal with if you approach them with a
reasonable attitide. ...


I guess the tech support must be hit or miss. I've never gotten any
satisfaction from them and I've tried hard. Also, my experience with
my Raytheon radar has been mixed at best and I would not recommend it.
Although, that's a moot point as they have moved on the their new
tech.

--Tom.


His friend has the same issues on his. Two faulty talkers?
Gordon

Bruce in alaska January 29th 08 08:00 PM

Raymarine product horrors
 
In article
,
cognisense wrote:

That portion of the video which shows the radar being out of sync with
the chart was shot while underway, doing 8.2 knots approaching Roche
Harbor in the San Juan Islands.


Sounds to "Me" that you really NEED a GOOD Marine Electronics Tech,
to go over your system. Did you install all this stuff yourself?
In the great scheme of things Marine, and Electronic, there are
Consumer Electronics, Professional Electronics, and then there is
the stuff the Commercial Boys use. RayNav is in the first Group.
If your looking for quality, RayNav isn't for you, but your going
to have to PAY for quality. If your looking for a GOOD Marine
Electronic TECH, in Seattle area, I would suggest Don Hollingsworth
Sr. or Jr. at G & L Marine Radio. There is No One better, or with
more experience, left down there, especially with Marine Radars.

--
Bruce in alaska
add path after fast to reply

[email protected] January 29th 08 08:30 PM

Raymarine product horrors
 
On Jan 29, 9:54 am, Gordon wrote:
... His friend has the same issues on his. Two faulty talkers? ...


That wouldn't surprise me, but bad cables are more common. It is
super easy to make a bad cable and the installer will probably have
had to make up several in each network. Of course, Raymarine could
have screwed-up the cables, too. In my experience, now very dated,
faulty cables made up the majority of problems on LANs followed by bad
NICs. We occasionally got whole lots of faulty NICs... Switch
failure was pretty rare.

-- Tom.


cognisense January 30th 08 01:59 AM

Raymarine product horrors
 
,

If your looking for quality, RayNav isn't for you, but your going
to have to PAY for quality.


Thanks for your thoughts. As a software developer and systems
architect, I would agree with your observation in most instances.
However, I believe that a laptop running Fugawi, Maptech or Nobeltec,
and connected to a USB GPS - and you could even throw in a Furuno
radar, is far less expensive - and in my experience of 6 years sailing
on the west side of Vancouver Island, far more reliable.

One bad motherboard on my E120 brought the entire radar & navigation
system OFF my boat for 8 weeks. I can carry 3 redundant laptops for
less than 1/4 of the cost of the E120 alone.


If your looking for a GOOD Marine Electronic TECH, in Seattle area,
I would suggest Don Hollingsworth Sr. or Jr. at G & L Marine Radio.


Awesome, and thanks for the reference. Subsequent to purchasing and
installing my E120, I've also found the guys at Victoria Marine &
Electric (BC) really know their stuff. Wish I had talked to them in
addition to everyone else I talked to pre-purchase!

By the way: I've posted more supporting videos which detail the
problems I'm having on YouTube:

http://youtube.com/user/cognisense

I understand that posting information to the internet leaves one open
to all sorts of criticism and uninformed opinions, but I know in my
heart that if I had seen these videos prior to purchasing the
Raymarine products, I would have saved the enormous amount of money I
put into it.

Better luck to all of you...




cognisense January 30th 08 02:27 AM

Raymarine product horrors
 
In ,
Bruce wrote:


If your looking for quality, RayNav isn't for you, but your going
to have to PAY for quality.


Thanks for your thoughts. As a software developer and systems
architect, I would agree with your observation in most instances.
However, I believe that a laptop running Fugawi, Maptech or Nobeltec,
and connected to a USB GPS - and you could even throw in a Furuno
radar, is far less expensive - and in my experience of 6 years sailing
on the west side of Vancouver Island, far more reliable.

One bad motherboard on my E120 brought the entire radar & navigation
system OFF my boat for 8 weeks. I can carry 3 redundant laptops for
less than 1/4 of the cost of the E120 alone.


If your looking for a GOOD Marine Electronic TECH, in Seattle area,
I would suggest Don Hollingsworth Sr. or Jr. at G & L Marine Radio.


Awesome, and thanks for the reference. Subsequent to purchasing and
installing my E120, I've also found the guys at Victoria Marine &
Electric (BC) really know their stuff.

Larry January 30th 08 03:46 AM

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.



Larry January 30th 08 03:53 AM

Raymarine product horrors
 
cognisense wrote in news:7d889c85-85a8-42b3-9f28-
:

I understand that posting information to the internet leaves one open
to all sorts of criticism and uninformed opinions, but I know in my
heart that if I had seen these videos prior to purchasing the
Raymarine products, I would have saved the enormous amount of money I
put into it.


Don't let the fanboyz, here, sway you from posting the TRUTH. I found your
videos very imformative and anyone can see truthful.

One other note I'd like you to investigate. Now many chart plugs do you
have on the system. Remove any chart plugs you're not using and any
Raymarine plotter speeds way up by not having to deal with so much data
from SUCH SLOW MEMORY CARDS. I try to only have ONE mounted in the two
slots on our RL70CRC...the one I'm using. All the searching and searching
gets much shorter....


Wayne.B January 30th 08 04:04 AM

Raymarine product horrors
 
On Tue, 29 Jan 2008 18:27:30 -0800 (PST), cognisense
wrote:

One bad motherboard on my E120 brought the entire radar & navigation
system OFF my boat for 8 weeks. I can carry 3 redundant laptops for
less than 1/4 of the cost of the E120 alone.


If you really want an integrated system that you can rely on, take a
look at the Furuno NavNet units. I've had one for over three years
and it has performed flawlessly. The 10 inch displays are
weatherproof, bright, and highly readable - even in direct sunlight.


cognisense January 30th 08 05:00 AM

Raymarine product horrors
 
On Jan 29, 7:53 pm, larry wrote:

Don't let the fanboyz, here, sway you from posting the TRUTH. I found your
videos very imformative and anyone can see truthful.


Thank you so much for that. I've got thick skin, but it's always
super-nice to see the spirit of another sailor shine through.

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


Yes. It's very interesting that you experienced similar jumps with
your old setup. I've only got one display and one GPS, but it is
possible that the jumps are being caused by something external to the
display. Another poster here had mentioned cable problems, and that's
worth looking into. I'll report back if I find anything.

You had also asked if I had more than one chart plugs in my network.
With the one display, there's only the one chart.

Quite frankly, however, it is my experience with the Raymarine company
- beyond the products - that has left me with the most sour taste in
my mouth. I've been requesting help from them since early this
summer, and I have been MOST patient with them. These YouTube videos
represent to me the end of a very long line of unanswered phone calls
and emails. Quite frankly, they represent my next to last resort.

I had decided to move away from PC based navigation based primarily
upon the blue-screen-of-death that occurs occasionally with my old USB
to serial converters. Once I had had my fill of the Raymarine and
began to investigate other options, the found the guys at Victoria
Marine & Electric and they directed me to a reliable USB to serial
converter, which I've now used for 2 months with zero problems. I'll
certainly keep your WebFoot recommendation handy as well, if I need to
try another approach.

I had a grant one year to use the Cap'n software. It really was a
great product. I've mostly used Maptech, which is also 100% reliable
- although not as feature-rich as the Cap'n.

The one feature that I really wanted in the Raymarine was the ability
to superimpose the radar image on top of the charts. This is a great
feature when approaching an unknown and crowded anchorage - seeing the
echoes of the other boats at anchor drawn over the depth contours
gives me lots of heads up about where to potentially anchor. The guys
at Vic Marine & Electric have shown me that you can get the same
feature with Nobeltec and a Furuno radar. I'll be investigating that
soon, and hope to have it on board before spring sets in.



cognisense January 30th 08 05:10 AM

Raymarine product horrors
 
On Jan 29, 11:14 am, GeoffSchultz
wrote:

Once again I will state that you need to look at the system as a
whole. The display head my not have any problems, but there could be
issues with devices on the SeaTalk bus.


Excellent points. I did have the GPS unit checked out with the E120,
and they claimed it to be working fine. Also on the SeaTalk bus are
the Wind/Speed/Depth instruments. When the E120 was off my boat, they
performed flawlessly.


I have a C80 which runs the same software that is on the C120 and I've
never seen any of the issues that you describe.


I'm certainly very happy for you that your system is working well.
Why mine is flawed is something that seems to confound my dealer as
well as the Raymarine distributor here in Canada.


Have you reviewed the output of the diagnostics such as SeaTalk
message errors?


That's another excellent suggestion. I'll look into this and report
back. It sure would have been nice if one of the Raymarine techs had
suggested it. But, as I've stated in other posts, they've ignored my
emails for over 60 days now. And believe me, my emails were very,
very politely written. All bitterness you or others might detect in
my videos was definitely not in the emails - and only exist in the
videos because this struggle has been going on all summer long and
I've been forced into taking my grievances public.


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