Nav system upgrade time

[Squanderbucks]

I have a mix of Raymarine Evo 100 autopilot with Garmin chartplotters and they work well together because they are both on the NMEA2000 network. Actually when I added the new Evo system I kept the existing St70 control head so I have autopilot control in two places.
The Garmin units I find easier for me to work with as I have been using them in various versions over the years. Even before Garmin came out with their autopilots. Garmin’s Are significantly more expensive as well.
With N2000 /Seatalk no connections you should be able to build what you want. If your old sultuff like AIS is not N2000 you may need a translator like the ones from Actisense.
Chartplotters need to be easy to use and update while cruising and picking one that Gus you is the most important. They all will tell you where you are but some are more intuitive than others.

[SofiaB]

Garmin everything. They get along with each other and a single update updates everything at once. Since 2016 they are bulletproof, so far.

[NevilleCat]

Originally Posted by ranger42c

I expect networking is more useful for some than for others... and some "specific networking" might be more useful than "networking in general."

Does your AP get time/position data from GPS? Can you create waypoints and routes and so forth in advance, then tell your AP to go there or follow a route?

-Chris

I'm not that experienced but I too don't understand the necessity or even desirability of having your AP networked to your plotter to follow a route?
Maybe on a cruising power boat it makes some sense but on a sail boat any course deviation is going to require adjusting sails etc and are you really going to stay below asleep, eating dinner etc and let it make a course change without being up there monitoring it?
It seems an ok part of your watchkeeping routine to occasionally push the plus or minus buttons on the control head to adjust headings?

[AJ-SeaChange]

Hi Chris, yes we have a depth sounder and several radios on board.


The issue we're having is intermittent. While in Turkey our Autohelm ST7000 died and the Rayamarine guy said it was too old be consider fault finding and repair. So he sold us a pre-owned Raymarine ST6002 autopilot control head and he came to our boat to install it.


5 weeks later we set off for a week long shakedown cruise and the ST6002 packed up after 3 hours. When it went down it also took out our GPS and AIS. Once we'd got to our anchorage I disconnected the cables from the back of the ST6002 and fired up the systems again. Thankfully the GPS and AIS came back on line.


3 weeks later we took the ST6002 into a recommended repair guy in Marmaris, Turkey. He fixed it overnight and I put it back on the boat and everything worked perfectly.


2 weeks later at anchor at Ios, Greece I did what I usually do every day, once our solar is producing power, I fired up all the instruments and went below. 45 minutes later I hear alarms beeping from the chart plotter and when I look at the instruments there is no display on the ST6002 and the GPS and AIS have gone again.


Our buddy boat is going back to Marmaris so he takes the ST6002 back into the technician who plugs it into his test system and it powers up perfectly, nothing wrong with it.


The ST6002 is slowly making its way back to us in Greece. Meanwhile we are getting plenty of hand steering practice.


5 days ago as we were about to leave an anchorage I power up the systems but the GPS and AIS fail to display on the chart plotter. After switching everything off and on about 7 times the GPS and AIS finally show up. Great, anchor up and off we go.


About 30 minutes into the trip we lose GPS and AIS, I patiently wait 10 minutes to see if they'll come back but they don't. I switch them off at the nav station and wait for 15 minutes, then power them back up and they are working again. And they have worked every day for the last week.


So there's something wrong somewhere and as most of the systems are quite old, especially the course computer brain, we thought it might be better to upgrade our systems.


Long story to tell and if you made it this far well done.

[AJ-SeaChange]

Originally Posted by ranger42c

Does your AP get time/position data from GPS? Can you create waypoints and routes and so forth in advance, then tell your AP to go there or follow a route?

-Chris

Hi Chris, to be honest we don't know as we have never tried to make it do that.

[AJ-SeaChange]

With the ST6002 (not +) being out of the mix and the GPS and AIS falling over, we are leaning towards it being a GPS issue, the AIS box was installed new just before we departed from Spain in September 2018.

[HeinSdL]

Originally Posted by ranger42c

I expect networking is more useful for some than for others... and some "specific networking" might be more useful than "networking in general."

Does your AP get time/position data from GPS? Can you create waypoints and routes and so forth in advance, then tell your AP to go there or follow a route?

-Chris

No, its quite a simple set up, the AP simply holds its course and I am not sure if the ROI would be that high networking and then being able to follow a number of WPs. Thinking mainly about having to be on deck anyway during a course change, primarily to monitor other traffic, and also to check the sails if sailing.

[HeinSdL]

AJ - As you may already have picked up from my earlier posts, I am not really into networking, really for the following reasons. I bought my boat almost 10 years ago from the yard, in Denmark. It just received a complete overhaul there. Quite frankly, even though they did a good job, this being my first boat (and prob my last, I would not want anything else!) I was surprised at the rolling occurrences of failures. But luckily the boat only had a Raymarine RN300 GPS (old...) and a Raymarine AP, quite standard stuff, so on the NAV side it was all quite OK because there simply wasn't that much to fail. So in the early days it was a question of putting positions on paper charts. (As we all did in the old days anyway...)


Later, when I decided that the boat had to be extremely simple, I only added an AIS box with a whole bunch of built in functionality such as WIFI so I could use apps on phones and tablets to do the navigating. Cross checking obviously with the physical outside and the GPS which was just sitting there showing a Lat/Lon. And when off-shift I could have my phone next to me in the bunk for the occasional hint on what was happening with the boat.


Nothing much talks to each other and I sense that the drive for gadgets is perhaps more a nice-to-have thing but therefore also easy-to-fail which really eats into enjoyment on board. Troubleshooting becomes so difficult I find in situations such as yours, and frustrating, no?

[AJ-SeaChange]

Frustrating it certainly is. We really want to keep everything as simple as possible.


Being an ex computer tech I also would prefer everything hard wired as opposed to wireless.


We agree that having the autopilot follow way points on the plotter is unneeded.


If possible we'd like to keep our Raymarine E80 and the two Garmin GMI 10 units.

[ranger58sb]

Originally Posted by HeinSdL

I have a 'philosophical' question about this. Why is it so important to integrate everything?

Originally Posted by ranger42c

I expect networking is more useful for some than for others... and some "specific networking" might be more useful than "networking in general."

Does your AP get time/position data from GPS? Can you create waypoints and routes and so forth in advance, then tell your AP to go there or follow a route?

Originally Posted by NevilleCat

I'm not that experienced but I too don't understand the necessity or even desirability of having your AP networked to your plotter to follow a route?
Maybe on a cruising power boat it makes some sense but on a sail boat any course deviation is going to require adjusting sails etc and are you really going to stay below asleep, eating dinner etc and let it make a course change without being up there monitoring it?
It seems an ok part of your watchkeeping routine to occasionally push the plus or minus buttons on the control head to adjust headings?

Originally Posted by AJ-SeaChange

Hi Chris, to be honest we don't know as we have never tried to make it do that.

Originally Posted by HeinSdL

No, its quite a simple set up, the AP simply holds its course and I am not sure if the ROI would be that high networking and then being able to follow a number of WPs. Thinking mainly about having to be on deck anyway during a course change, primarily to monitor other traffic, and also to check the sails if sailing.

Originally Posted by AJ-SeaChange

We agree that having the autopilot follow way points on the plotter is unneeded.

I suspect that speaks the to nub of the issue; if you don't need to follow waypoints and routes, networking probably becomes less important.

FWIW, our system can do all that, and we rarely use it that way. I'm content with occasional course jogs after I've told the AP to "go straight".

That said, some people do use waypoints and routes religiously, and I expect that drives the market, to a certain extent.

I can see that being slightly more common in the power boat world, where straight-line (sorta) transits would be more common compared to tacking/gybing with the wind (although we're not completely immune from having to tack, sometimes)... and in many power boats, the nav station is often on a bridge deck of some sort, not at a nav station buried somewhere below decks...

Another reason for networking could be about needing fewer display units, something that A64 mentioned. For example, RADAR or a fishfinder output displayed on the same MFD the chartplotter function is using. Sometimes used to get more info in smaller real estate. Or to cut down on the cost of additional display units. Probably another "if you don't need that, networking might not be your bag."

-Chris

[ranger58sb]

Originally Posted by AJ-SeaChange

3 weeks later we took the ST6002 into a recommended repair guy in Marmaris, Turkey. He fixed it overnight and I put it back on the boat and everything worked perfectly.

2 weeks later at anchor at Ios, Greece I did what I usually do every day, once our solar is producing power, I fired up all the instruments and went below. 45 minutes later I hear alarms beeping from the chart plotter and when I look at the instruments there is no display on the ST6002 and the GPS and AIS have gone again.

Our buddy boat is going back to Marmaris so he takes the ST6002 back into the technician who plugs it into his test system and it powers up perfectly, nothing wrong with it.

So there's something wrong somewhere and as most of the systems are quite old, especially the course computer brain, we thought it might be better to upgrade our systems.

Long story to tell and if you made it this far well done.

That can maybe helps folks ponder suggestions for updates/upgrades...

I wonder if maybe you have a power problem, though? If the ST is working fine, but suddenly isn't, you have unexpected black-outs on GPS and AIS... IOW, something affecting several systems at the same time... then I'm thinking maybe there some more universal issue over and above just having older components.

??

If so, maybe you can pin that down, fix it... and then pick and choose which individual components you might still feel could benefit from a refresh.

-Chris

[Alita49DS]

I go back to the original question which relates to a Jeanneau 46 Sun Odyssey. Sadly the year is not given but since there is reference to an E series MFD I suspect that it is around the same vintage as my 49DS.

If that is the case, then I went through the same question in some detail last year after two of the ST60 instruments failed and as a result cut the power and data to the Seatalk bus. Including to the autopilot. Which was not fun - hand steering for over 400 miles until bypassed the duff units.

Ultimately, which was after a lot of research, the decision came down to two options: -

1. Replace the two duff ST60 Raymarine instruments. Which Raymarine will not help with.
2. Rip the naff Seatalk1 bus out and replace the lot, other than perhaps the autopilot ram, using a new NMEA2000 backbone.

Option 2 was technically attractive. I would have used Garmin for one overriding reason. If you set a route or Go To you get a highly visible purple line on the MFD. On RM you get a pecked line that is near invisible.

However, we only cruise. The current set up works. The autopilot sometimes has a mind of its own but generally functions well even in strong winds. The cost of starting again was adding at least one zero to the cost of patching up the functioning system. Marine electronics are improving all the time.

In the end, tempting though it was to go to the toy shop, I went onto eBay and bought two legacy replacement RM heads. One was brand new and the other fine. Total outlay £380. The RM stuff talked before to the Garmin MFD using an ES8001 which converts to NMEA0183. The large E series RM plotter below I rarely use as I hate it.

So, your call. Money in the bank or this year's kit? My conclusion was that one had to either go the whole hog or patch and mend.

[j.g.evans]

To save money you can have Raymarine and Garmin integrated into one system. RM Seatalkng and NMEA 2000 can be interconnected by splicing cables. The color coding of the wires is the same, the connectors are different. I have a system with a Garmin NEMA 2000 chart plotter and GPS running with RM Seatalkng WIND, DEPTH transducers and instruments. I even have old RM ST60 instruments using a RM converter. The ST60 instruments have NEMA 183 interfaces to feed GPS info to a VHF.