Tired of Bugs in Navico Equipment

[tanglewood]

Originally Posted by colemj

We also have CE and an external daylight-viewable waterproof touch screen and agree that this is a great system, with the exception of radar overlay. We have had it for the past 8 years or so. However, it is a very costly system compared to a chart plotter, and uses much more power - even more cost and power when you add a separate radar.

But your points are valid, with the exception that some chart plotters offer sailing features that CE doesn't - although you can get those with Expedition and other programs (again, much more $$$).

And to be clear, CE doesn't offer autopilot control - correct? If it does, then I have missed this and want to know.

Mark

Very costly compare to an MFD? Here's roughly how mine came out:

$400 for a CE license (actually good for three machines)
$800 for a mac mini to run it
$3200 for a 24" widescreen, daylight, dimmable, 24V monitor.

So $4400 with a monitor that's much bigger than any MFD. Last I looked, an MFD is in the $4000 +/- range.

All the cost is in the monitor if you want/need a "marine" monitor. If you can forgo the "marine" monitor, I think it's much less expensive which is why I mentioned wheel houses where an expensive monitor isn't required.

Anyway, it's a different way to slice the pie, and one that should at least be considered.

And yes, CE can control an auto pilot, where "control" means that it is the navigation source providing a route and XTE to the Pilot, just as an MFD does. It does NOT act as a control panel for the pilot. You still need to press "Nav" to follow a route. I've used it personally with a Simrad AC12/AP24, a Simrad AC42/AP28, and a Furuno NavPilot 700. And I've interfaced them using both N2K and 0183. Works great.

[jessehunt]

Dockhead, I've recently been seeing ads or Navionics HD charts for Garmen plotters. Haven't looked into it in great detail, but looks interesting.

[colemj]

Originally Posted by tanglewood

Last I looked, an MFD is in the $4000 +/- range.

….
And yes, CE can control an auto pilot, where "control" means that it is the navigation source providing a route and XTE to the Pilot, just as an MFD does. It does NOT act as a control panel for the pilot. You still need to press "Nav" to follow a route. I've used it personally with a Simrad AC12/AP24, a Simrad AC42/AP28, and a Furuno NavPilot 700. And I've interfaced them using both N2K and 0183. Works great.

I agree it's a different way to slice the pie - we have a similar setup.

However, there is a very wide range of chart plotters available for <$1,000 (even less than an iPad). These will not contain radar functionality, but they will connect to networks and use all the data as well as provide navigation direction to an AP. Essentially, they are the same functionality as CE.

OK, that's how we use CE for AP control (also an AC42). I thought you might have stumbled on a way to actually control the AP from it.

Mark

[tanglewood]

Originally Posted by colemj

OK, that's how we use CE for AP control (also an AC42). I thought you might have stumbled on a way to actually control the AP from it.

Mark

Right, the control pads on all the different APs are proprietary as far as I know, so I doubt we will ever see CE providing a virtual control panel for any AP. That will always only be in the same vendor's MFDs. Simrad did just that in their MFDs, but it turned out to be one of the piles of bugs that caused me to remove the entire system.

Vendors love MFDs because of these extra integration features that they can offer, and that lock you into their brand for all/most of your electronics. But in my experience so far, it's those integrated features that are the source of most bugs. By forgoing such features, you can avoid vendor lock-in, purchase best of breed for each individual component, and avoid a lot of bugs.

[colemj]

Originally Posted by tanglewood

Vendors love MFDs because of these extra integration features that they can offer, and that lock you into their brand for all/most of your electronics. But in my experience so far, it's those integrated features that are the source of most bugs. By forgoing such features, you can avoid vendor lock-in, purchase best of breed for each individual component, and avoid a lot of bugs.

Yes, I agree to some extent. AP control in an MFD seems almost superfluous to me, but there are some MFD integration features like radar that are almost unavoidable if one doesn't have the space at the helm for separate best of breed stuff.

Other than radar, AP control, and sonar (not simple depth), I can't think of any other lock-in integration features of MFD's. All that I know will accept and use all standard NMEA data from anyone else's equipment. We have a complete hodge-podge of stuff that works perfectly together - although we don't have AP control or sonar on our MFD.

In Dockhead's case, it seems to be either his MFD in general that has problems, or it is the AP control within that MFD that is the problem (I don't think he has sonar).

Mark

[tanglewood]

Originally Posted by colemj

Other than radar, AP control, and sonar (not simple depth), I can't think of any other lock-in integration features of MFD's. All that I know will accept and use all standard NMEA data from anyone else's equipment. We have a complete hodge-podge of stuff that works perfectly together - although we don't have AP control or sonar on our MFD.

I agree those are the main lock-in points. Others that I've run into are XM weather which is usually a vendor-specific gadget with display support on the MFD. And the proliferation of wifi and ipad apps creates another vendor-specific branch off the tree. And in some cases Charts are proprietary. Garmin was the worst until their recent support for Navionics. And Furuno is either bad or good with their chart plotters depending on how you look at it. They offer a very wide range of chart choices, but all are in a proprietary format available only through mapmedia, and they typically lag the regular versions from which they are derived. I've been burned by that a couple of times.

I got around the key lockin points as follows:

- The separate AP control head I actually prefer because it gives dedicated buttons and dials for mode control and course adjustments. So I see the separate head as a feature, not a problem.

- Radar overlay worried me the most. But now that I have discovered that CE can plot targets expressed my the TTM sentence, I have what I really care about, namely targets plotted on the CE chart so I can see clearly where they are in the context of everything else. I just got this working and it's been a huge benefit. If your radar outputs TTM (and I think TLL works too), all you need to do is feed that into CE.

- For the sounder I just installed a dedicated sounder. It cost less than the add-on sounder module for either the Simrad or Furuno MFD systems, so cost-wise it was a step forward.

Point taken on dash panel real estate and the constraints that creates. I have the luxury of a pilot house with plenty of space, though I've managed to fill it up pretty full.

[colemj]

Originally Posted by tanglewood

- Radar overlay worried me the most. But now that I have discovered that CE can plot targets expressed my the TTM sentence, I have what I really care about, namely targets plotted on the CE chart so I can see clearly where they are in the context of everything else. I just got this working and it's been a huge benefit. If your radar outputs TTM (and I think TLL works too), all you need to do is feed that into CE.

Will you email me details on this? I think our Furuno outputs TTM. Will this be on the N2K bus, or do I need to wire in the 0183?

If one cruises in areas with poor chart accuracy, radar overlay is helpful.

Mark

[tanglewood]

Originally Posted by colemj

Will you email me details on this? I think our Furuno outputs TTM. Will this be on the N2K bus, or do I need to wire in the 0183?

If one cruises in areas with poor chart accuracy, radar overlay is helpful.

Mark

How about if I start a new thread. That way others can benefit from the discussion...

[Pyxis156]

Originally Posted by Dockhead

My system is better now than it was, but I still have constant problems with the pilot keypad -- it crashes at least every few days. The plotters crash from time to time; the non-touch Zeus RELIABLY crashes when you shut it down. The pilot gets confused. The worst thing lately has been a lag in display of project course line, which eliminates the useful of the plotter for close maneuvering.

Dockhead,

Not to say there aren't issues with the B&G equipment (as the recent Zeus2 firmware update shows), but perhaps my experiences might help some. We recently purchased a boat with Furuno instruments (chartplotter, radar, displays, AIS, etc.) and a Raymarine autopilot. It worked ok, but was prone to spontaneous resets / crashes and communication between the autopilot and the Furuno chartplotter was tenuous at best with fairly frequent AUTOPILOT NOT FOUND type errors.

Upon getting the boat to our home port (and being completely fed up with the system after the passage from San Francisco to Puget Sound) I tore into the instruments to find the problem(s) and finally made the decision to pull out the existing gear and mixed 0183/N2K network and install an all new B&G system and N2K only network. I did the work myself under the supervision of a certified installer that was doing a Li battery refit on our boat at the same time. Over the course of six weeks I had a mini-apprenticeship and learned a lot, and discovered that N2K network problems can wreak havoc with your instruments causing symptoms I would never have attributed to intermittent network issues.

Fortunately the installer doing the battery refit had a Maretron N2K Meter that allowed me to get inside the network and look at things like voltages and impedances that I could have done with a good multimeter, but it made things a lot easier. Several conversations with Maretron's tech support also gave me some good starting points for my troubleshooting. I discovered two factory N2K cables with issues, a Tee that was just barely to spec, a Furuno display on the dodger that apparently had enough moisture built up inside it that whenever it rained enough it would short something out on the network side (the display kept working!) and would send wild voltage fluctuation through the N2K network causing instruments, chartplotter and autopilot to seemingly randomly crash or hang. Perhaps most bizarrely I also was able to discover that one of my N2K tank level senders had somehow managed to claim the N2K "broadcast" address, something that should not be possible, and that every time something sent a packet to it, it was sending it to every device on the network causing periodic packet storms that might bring the network to its knees... or not. It all seemed very random, sporadic, and the last thing I suspected was my network to be the cause.

After finding all this and dealing with it, my new system consisting of the following units all connected to my N2K network has been running very well with no real issues:

Multiple Zeus2 plotters
Multiple Triton Displays
AC42 Autopilot and Rudder Position Sensor
B&G 4G Radar
B&G 508 Masthead Wind Transducer
B&G Z-100 GPS
B&G V50 VHF
Vesper XB-8000 AIS
Maretron SSC 200 Heading Sensor
Airmar DST 800 Transducer
Multiple Maretron and Offshore Systems Tank Level Senders
Offshore Systems Fuel Transfer Controller
Multiple Maretron DCM Units to monitor solar, wind, alternator, loads, etc.
Maretron DSM-250 Display
Maretron USB-100 Gateway
Rose Point USB/N2K Gateway
GoFree WiFi Module
Fusion UD750 Stereo (controlled from Zeus2 units via N2K)

It is a lot of stuff, not all from the same vendor, and things now seem to be much better behaved. I apologize for being long winded, but my point being that most if not almost all my problems were actually caused by N2K network issues, and to a much lesser degree instrument / equipment / software issues. Some were intermittent and rather insidious and would have been very difficult to track down without the N2K Analyzer, but like I said you could do it with a good multimeter that allows you to track minimum and maximum voltages and resistance over time, but it would take a lot longer.

I am happy to answer any questions or discuss things with you further if it might help. I have valued your posts over the years as we bought and outfit our own boats and am happy to give back if I can!

Steve

[tanglewood]

My N2K experience has been similar. It's more like Plug and Pray rather than Plug and Play. But once you get a set of products that work properly together, it works well. But hard to debug, and I agree an analyzer is essential. The other challenge is that often times device and/or network miss-operation won't manifest itself as any obvious problem with your equipment, until all the stars align and something takes a crap, resulting in strange intermittent problems. I'd bet a box of donuts that if I hooked an analyzer up to any random N2K network with more than 5-10 devices on it that I could identify at least one bug in at least one product.

[Dockhead]

Originally Posted by Pyxis156

Dockhead,

Not to say there aren't issues with the B&G equipment (as the recent Zeus2 firmware update shows), but perhaps my experiences might help some. We recently purchased a boat with Furuno instruments (chartplotter, radar, displays, AIS, etc.) and a Raymarine autopilot. It worked ok, but was prone to spontaneous resets / crashes and communication between the autopilot and the Furuno chartplotter was tenuous at best with fairly frequent AUTOPILOT NOT FOUND type errors.

Upon getting the boat to our home port (and being completely fed up with the system after the passage from San Francisco to Puget Sound) I tore into the instruments to find the problem(s) and finally made the decision to pull out the existing gear and mixed 0183/N2K network and install an all new B&G system and N2K only network. I did the work myself under the supervision of a certified installer that was doing a Li battery refit on our boat at the same time. Over the course of six weeks I had a mini-apprenticeship and learned a lot, and discovered that N2K network problems can wreak havoc with your instruments causing symptoms I would never have attributed to intermittent network issues.

Fortunately the installer doing the battery refit had a Maretron N2K Meter that allowed me to get inside the network and look at things like voltages and impedances that I could have done with a good multimeter, but it made things a lot easier. Several conversations with Maretron's tech support also gave me some good starting points for my troubleshooting. I discovered two factory N2K cables with issues, a Tee that was just barely to spec, a Furuno display on the dodger that apparently had enough moisture built up inside it that whenever it rained enough it would short something out on the network side (the display kept working!) and would send wild voltage fluctuation through the N2K network causing instruments, chartplotter and autopilot to seemingly randomly crash or hang. Perhaps most bizarrely I also was able to discover that one of my N2K tank level senders had somehow managed to claim the N2K "broadcast" address, something that should not be possible, and that every time something sent a packet to it, it was sending it to every device on the network causing periodic packet storms that might bring the network to its knees... or not. It all seemed very random, sporadic, and the last thing I suspected was my network to be the cause.

After finding all this and dealing with it, my new system consisting of the following units all connected to my N2K network has been running very well with no real issues:

Multiple Zeus2 plotters
Multiple Triton Displays
AC42 Autopilot and Rudder Position Sensor
B&G 4G Radar
B&G 508 Masthead Wind Transducer
B&G Z-100 GPS
B&G V50 VHF
Vesper XB-8000 AIS
Maretron SSC 200 Heading Sensor
Airmar DST 800 Transducer
Multiple Maretron and Offshore Systems Tank Level Senders
Offshore Systems Fuel Transfer Controller
Multiple Maretron DCM Units to monitor solar, wind, alternator, loads, etc.
Maretron DSM-250 Display
Maretron USB-100 Gateway
Rose Point USB/N2K Gateway
GoFree WiFi Module
Fusion UD750 Stereo (controlled from Zeus2 units via N2K)

It is a lot of stuff, not all from the same vendor, and things now seem to be much better behaved. I apologize for being long winded, but my point being that most if not almost all my problems were actually caused by N2K network issues, and to a much lesser degree instrument / equipment / software issues. Some were intermittent and rather insidious and would have been very difficult to track down without the N2K Analyzer, but like I said you could do it with a good multimeter that allows you to track minimum and maximum voltages and resistance over time, but it would take a lot longer.

I am happy to answer any questions or discuss things with you further if it might help. I have valued your posts over the years as we bought and outfit our own boats and am happy to give back if I can!

Steve

Thank you very much!

I have of course wondered whether network issues might have anything to do with it.

The network itself was well designed using N2KBuilder from Maretron.

However -- what if there are bad cables or something?

I think probably I should exclude network problems before making a final conclusion. So I'll do as you suggested.

Certainly, there are massive communications problems in my network -- not just the classic "No Autopilot Control" etc., but particularly irritating with alarms which aren't always cancelled on all devices when you cancel on one, and where parameters aren't always changed when you change on one.

But one thing which is for sure not a network problem is the Zeus non-touch which crashes in at least 20% of the cases when you shut it down, requiring me to unscrew an instrument panel to get at a breaker for a cold reboot

Also all the pilot control conflicts, and crashes of the keypad. Bleh.

[GrahamHO]

Originally Posted by Dockhead

I've been allowing myself to fantasize a little about building a new boat, a fantasy which might never be realized, but one can dream, right?

When I got to electronics in my thoughts about how to specify it, I realized that I probably wouldn't go with Navico again. Something which surprised me, since I have loved this gear despite the problems with it.

The whole idea and functionality of the Zeus plotters and Triton MFDs is fantastic, but I have had to learn to leave with constant bugs and glitches, and why should I? My system is better now than it was, but I still have constant problems with the pilot keypad -- it crashes at least every few days. The plotters crash from time to time; the non-touch Zeus RELIABLY crashes when you shut it down. The pilot gets confused. The worst thing lately has been a lag in display of project course line, which eliminates the useful of the plotter for close maneuvering.

I'm just tired of it -- it's obviously not engineered and developed to standards of critical use equipment, however great it is in so many other ways.

I think it will be back to Ray, or over to Furuno, next time around.

My last Raymarine plotter, from the Pathfinder era, never crashed once during my ownership of it. Not one malfunction or glitch of any kind. It worked like military hardware, and that's the way crucial navigation instruments should work.

When I had bugs in my electronics I eventually realised they were caused by voltage spikes in the same house battery circuit. Especially from Autohelm as it sends spikes in both directions as it reverses. Anything like a water pump or inverter or the alternator can do that.

I made a independent instrument circuit with its own battery and only solar charging. That worked for me. You can also buy a black box
which isolates the instruments as you may need more power than I do.

My Navman plotter lost its memory and now they are Navico. They said it's ten years old and we won't service it. I opened it up and replaced the button battery with a half AA lithium which I soldered in. Twice the capacity and it cost me $4 and took 30 mins including a coffee stop.

[jr_spyder]

Dockhead,

I always appreciate your candor and experience with these products. I've written long threads before about my own problems early on with B&G but happy to say I've been a happy user now for two seasons. The only occasional bug I have left is my depth alarm goes off incorrectly once every couple weeks. I have some minor quips about usability, features, and documentation, but the gear has been great.

You mentioned you have a Maretron backbone. Have you run their N2K Analyzer software? When I was having my issues I found this to be incredibly useful and revealing. Even more useful was the tech support on the phone from Maretron helping me make sense of it all. Then I was well armed with B&G to discuss the issues.

You probably know that the Tritons and I think the Zues (not 100% sure) are not N2K certified. They clearly play nice on N2K networks as lots of threads here show, but they don't play entirely by the rules. I don't know why. The issue I saw as a potential problem (I'm a somewhat experience networking guy) is that all the devices are unnecessarily chatty on the backbone. So there's plenty of room for conflict. You expect sensors to be chatty putting out their data, but you expect displays to be relatively passive. It turns out the Tritons are screamers. I have 8 of them and saw all the noise they create in the N2K Analyzer. The Maretron support guy was polite and professional, but wasn't impressed with Navico's way to do all this.

What this means is that the backbone has to be really good as a starting point especially for a large system (I have 20 N2K devices hanging on mine). The N2K analyzer could tell you a lot if you haven't used it.

[colemj]

Originally Posted by jr_spyder

You probably know that the Tritons and I think the Zues (not 100% sure) are not N2K certified. They clearly play nice on N2K networks as lots of threads here show, but they don't play entirely by the rules. I don't know why.

One of the issues with Triton certification is that they allow daisy-chaining, which is not allowed in N2K certification.

Mark

[mstrebe]

Originally Posted by colemj

One of the issues with Triton certification is that they allow daisy-chaining, which is not allowed in N2K certification.

Mark

Raymarine also allows daisy-chaining of their control heads. It helps a lot when adding just an additional head, and I successfully daisy-chained an N2K Garmin chart-plotter through a RayMarine p70 autopilot control head to save a cable run on my 26' boat.

I'm not sure if they use a direct electrical connection for the daisy-chaining or if they just repeat the commands between the two ports, but it works well even though it's not N2K standard.

RayMarine and Navico can't get NMEA certified because they use their own connector standards, and the connectors are part of the standard. They've given that up and don't use the trademarked terms, which is why they've both named their networks something proprietary even though they're N2K compliant above the physical layer.

NMEA certification is expensive for smaller manufacturers. It's $50K just to obtain the full specification, and some such for each device certified. I think fewer and fewer manufacturers are bothering as they're realizing most people trust the brands more than they trust the NMEA.

I think the NMEA shot themselves in the foot trying to be closed with NMEA 2000. It took almost a decade for manufacturers to get products out the door and a good five years to iron out the compatibility problems. Its only just now becoming universally useful, just as marine Ethernet and WiFi are emerging as viable, open-standard competitors.