Raymarine plotters keep rebooting

Very strange. Left Gig Harbor heading North and both chart plotters keep rebooting, over and over. Not terribly happy as it means no course following ability and I am back to my paper charts.

Anyone have any ideas?

Power glitch? Batteries low and a heavy load cycling on and off?

Don't know what model you have but the Raymarine folks seem to be responsive on their forum. For example see
E120 Classic Periodic Restart

BobH said:

Power glitch? Batteries low and a heavy load cycling on and off?

Click to expand...

That was my thought as I know that the RM tend to be very sensitive to low voltage. The batteries seem to be in good shape and are sowing 14v while under way. I did turn off everything but the plotters and then they seem to stay on. I have since been power to the other instruments and it all seems to be working now.

It doesn't give me a lot of confidence however. I will continue to keep my paper charts out and track our position there as well.

danderer said:

Don't know what model you have but the Raymarine folks seem to be responsive on their forum. For example see
E120 Classic Periodic Restart

Click to expand...

Yeah, I searched the RM site but didn't find much. The MFDs were rebooting continually, going through the same sequence in exactly the same time so I don't think it was say a loose wire which would be more intermittent.

Since 2 different displays are behaving the same way, I would look for an external cause. Your batteries may have good voltage but there may be something in between causing a voltage drop. Are both displays on the same circuit? (If they are as a long term fix I would suggest putting them on 2 different dedicated circuits) is there a way to "ask" the display what voltage it is seeing? In other words is there a screen that shows voltage?

Ken

I'm a strong believer that when electronics start doing weird stuff, grounds should be the first thing checked.

Dave, I have twice had both my Raymarine e125s reboot without warning while underway. The first time it happened we found one of the house batteries had died (so as some of the earlier posts mentioned, it was related to power drop - easily understandable and fixable). The second time it happened was more unusual - I was playing with the AIS settings on the "slave" unit on the flybridge - the reboots stopped happening when I made the AIS settings the same on both the saloon "master" unit and the flybridge unit (I dont know why or how that mattered, but it seems it did). H.

On our E series, this happened two times. Each time it was an internal power supply board. First time we sent the display in for an expedited repair, second time we upgraded to the then newest Hybridtouch displays...
Verify that you have good voltage first, perform a master reset second and then, well then you send the display in.
That was our reality!
Bruce

Since you did not specify which model units you have it may make a difference. The older RM e120's did have a voltage sensitively issue. There was a upgrade to the firmware to help lower the voltage point at which this occurred.

Check all your electrical connections. Make sure they are clean and tight. If all is good it maybe that you will need to upgrade wire size to the buss supplying the electronics. I had this same issue with my 37 Intrepid with older RM electronics. I finally had to run a totally separate buss with really large wire (number 4 wire) just for the electronics. Once completed I never had another problem. I was amazed at just how much better the performance of each unit was.

Just a thought.

Same thing...performed master reset and all good for now (3 months)

Thanks for all the great ideas. Something else I found out. The radar is not working at all. I am wondering if the folks that did the polish and wax may have jostled something loose as I noticed that the camera mounted on the arcby the antennas is at an angle now.

Pray for no fog since I don't have radar.

When we bought Beachcomber she had an older Raymarine plotter that was loaded with Great Lakes chips/charts. I had a new chip that had west coast data and that started a continuing reboot.


I called Raymarine and they said it was because the old software in the MFD couldn't read the new software on the chip I'd bought.


They recommended their chip that would update all the software in the MFD so it could then read the new software on the new chip.


That fixed it.

Now I think my systems compass is acting up. My Magnetic compass is tell me that I am on a 347 degree magnetic course. My gps is telling me that my cog is 3 degrees. That makes sense. However my AP is saying that my track is 001 degrees magnetic and the plotter is saying that my heading is 18 degrees true.

Let me make this easier.
Compass heading. 347 Mag
GPS COG: 003 True
AP track: 001 Mag
Plotter heading: 018 True

This says to me that the compass embedded in the Nav system is off by about 15 degrees. When I get a chance I will try and go through the the sea calibration procedure again and see if that corrects the problem. No wonder my poor AP is so confused! It really hunts for the heading when first told to track a course. It eventually settles down as it starts to believe what the GPS is telling it.

Raymarine MFD rebooting

Recently had this problem with our C120 circa 2006 unit. We shut the unit down, pulled the CF card and the reboot cycle stopped. The first time this happened was just as we started to cross the Columbia Bar on our way up to the Gulf Islands last month. Needless to say we lost all use of it and autopilot/speed/depth until we got to Westport where we worked on it and found the card was bad. We swapped to our Canadian CF card and it behaved normally again. It has now worked for a month without issues. FYI, we already have the latest Raymarine firmware for our unit. Hope your fix is as simple!

A few months ago, we had some surprise plotter shutdowns. Turned out to be just a slightly untight battery cable.


-Chris

Track, course and heading...3 different things.

Autopilot compasses are often way off..usually no big deal unless you hate seeing the difference.

Those 2 things don't necessarily prove anything is wrong.

Especially if all the units on all the machines aren't set up to magnetic or true.

Those issues probably can be resolved...the rebooting is an issue unless something simple like a loose connector or sofware.

Autopilot pump sharing DC source with plotters? AP can draw more amps than most elec gear and can spike. My ap pump gets a clogged commutator that I have to clean periodically or amps go way up.

This is exactly why I have two MFD's. Raymarine and the other is Garmin. Redundancy in devices and manufactures.
Its all good. ?