All Systems Failed

I posted this over at AGLCA too...

Had a weird glitch yesterday, and lost all my systems at once. Running from the flybridge and my Furuno GPS unit, which we were using for depth and speed went black. Went into pilothouse, and my Garmin 6212 had stopped navigating and my identical Furuno down there also not working. I have an older Furuno unit down there as well, it would power on, but no GPS data. Also noticed my GPS info on my VHF not working. Garmin can’t find a satellite. I understand if the antenna goes down or there’s a glitch where I lose GPS, but why would my depth guage and wind data stop working? Is it a NMEA 0183 issue?

Anyway, I’ve done all I can with my limited skills - reconnected all the cables and connections, stared at manuals, cussed and drank beer (after we anchored), to no avail. It doesnt look like i have a ton of marine electronics dealers to choose from in the Upper Mississippi area. Anyone have any suggestions on either a fix or somebody in the area who works on marine electronics?

Thanks,
Louis

Looks like regional airliners are having a similar issue.


Not aware of the problem...thought there was supposed t be one back on Apr 11th.

lwilham said:

I posted this over at AGLCA too...

Had a weird glitch yesterday, and lost all my systems at once. Running from the flybridge and my Furuno GPS unit, which we were using for depth and speed went black. Went into pilothouse, and my Garmin 6212 had stopped navigating and my identical Furuno down there also not working. I have an older Furuno unit down there as well, it would power on, but no GPS data. Also noticed my GPS info on my VHF not working. Garmin can’t find a satellite. I understand if the antenna goes down or there’s a glitch where I lose GPS, but why would my depth guage and wind data stop working? Is it a NMEA 0183 issue?

Anyway, I’ve done all I can with my limited skills - reconnected all the cables and connections, stared at manuals, cussed and drank beer (after we anchored), to no avail. It doesnt look like i have a ton of marine electronics dealers to choose from in the Upper Mississippi area. Anyone have any suggestions on either a fix or somebody in the area who works on marine electronics?

Thanks,
Louis

Click to expand...

One question. Do you have a handheld VHF that gives your GPS position??

WAG; the power feed to a NMEA2k network had gone bad.

Probably a good idea in general, NOT to have most nav on one network.

What changed? Any new additions? Did you add any LED or fluorescent lights that cause RF noise? How is you house battery water levels?

GPS was being test jammed in the upper Midwest... there was a NOTAM (Notice to Airmen) put out on it based out of Wisconsin if I recall...

Anyway, as stated already, regionally, there was widespread issues with air carriers having to amend approaches from GPS approaches to other navaids....

I had the same symptoms a couple weeks or so ago in Florida. My ancient Seatalk-1 GPS receiver went bad, produced corrupt data at high rate, and overwhelmed the system's ability to process it. I lost all Seatalk-1 and NMEA-0183 data, but NMEA-2000 data was fine. It didn't matter if the GPS was plugged directly into the C120 or a Seatalk-1 hub off of the ST-NG<->ST-1 bridge.

I still don't know how a bad ST-1 device managed to affect the NMEA-0183 data paths -- but it did. I must have plugged and unplugged it one thosand time with a dumbfounded look on my face. My best guess is that it caused the C120 to misbehave and flood bad data in return, or something.

Ultimately, I unplugged the device and everthing worked, but GPS on that plotter (which was obviously missing)I changed the Miniplex-3 configuration to route GPS from the radio to the plotter and GPS came back online on the plotter. I then bought a NMEA-2000 GPS receiver and added it to the network, unrouted the radio GPS and was still good to go.

Not sure if this has anything to do with anything...but...for whatbit is worth.

LORAN was great until GPS became the norm.
Now we GPS can be jammed .....
Hello sexton.

Never been a fan of inttergration. I have all my systems independant where possible. I.e my Furuno MFD's are not (Radar,depth,GPS,Speed etc) All the rest are and the new stuff going in will be standalone to a high degree.

OldDan1943 said:

LORAN was great until GPS became the norm.
Now we GPS can be jammed .....
Hello sexton.

Click to expand...

LORAN was never great. It worked much better on airplanes then on boats. I found radio direction finders more accurate than LORAN.

tiltrider1 said:

LORAN was never great. It worked much better on airplanes then on boats. I found radio direction finders more accurate than LORAN.

Click to expand...

Whoa, radio direction finder.... that's going back in time.
Do they still make the antennas and receivers?
Yes, I know one can use a handheld AM radio and a weak AM station, holding the radio in front of you and rotating your body until the station disappears or signal almost disappears, then that particular station will be behind you. Far from as accurate as the official antenna and receiver.
Of course, we will all need charts indicating the location of the transmitters too.

Plus Loran was location-specific.... some places it was very accurate ....other places it was almost useless.


Fisherman on the East Coast swore by it and used it well into the GPS era.

psneeld said:

Plus Loran was location-specific.... some places it was very accurate ....other places it was almost useless.


Fisherman on the East Coast swore by it and used it well into the GPS era.

Click to expand...

Thread drift alert!
LORAN was very repeatable if you had been there before. Excellent for fishing or inlet channels. GPS had SA turned on (300 ft radius repeatability which sucks), chartplotters were expensive and crude. Not to mention all of your fishing "spots" were in LORAN numbers that did not precisely convert. Basically you had to have both. Find your spot with LORAN then hit MARK on the GPS. Even doing that though, come back the next day and you could be 300 ft off.

Thanks for all the replies. We have numerous handheld GPS nav tools, so the navigation isn’t the issue, its that all the stuff went down at once. New boat for us, and about half the systems are head scratchers (no redundancy if they all feed from the same unit, etc.). Could be the damned bananas on the boat too... [emoji848]

To the OP,

A while ago, when my boat was new to me, when we were offshore (of course), all my Raymarine screens and autopilot and radar all suddenly went blank. All out of nowhere.

Turns out we had (a) one of the house batteries was dead and possibly therefore 'pulling' the others down and (b) the inlet airheaters on the engines were both constantly running due to a software glitch and drawing huge loads from the engine alternators. The consequence was that several hours after leaving dock (and the shorepower) the batteries slowly discharged down to a level where the electronics all just decided to turn themselves off at the same time.

So maybe check batteries and any heavy voltage draws?

Hamish.

I would think the commercial air folks and commercial marine shippers would be demanding the next generation of secure GPS and ideally we recreational boaters will benefit too.
I have long maintained, "we" should jot down our position every 30minutes to 1 hour so if things "go south" we will at least know where we were.
It is one thing if we are on the ICW or a few miles off the coast..... but, if we are doing some serious off shore cruising, we need to know.

BrisHamish said:

To the OP,
So maybe check batteries and any heavy voltage draws?
Hamish.

Click to expand...

Two incidents for me.

1.While docking, use the bow thruster, main engine would shut down. Shut down on ME battery low voltage. Replaced start battery and moved the bow thruster to the 'now' 3 house batteries.

Fridge problem, bad house batteries.... Replaced the 3 house batteries, fridge works fine.

The 4D batteries were about 5 years old.

A/N remember that aviators?

"holding the radio in front of you and rotating your body until the station disappears or signal almost disappears, then that particular station will be behind you"

Actually the radio station could as easily be in front , the null just fives the line ( bearing to or from ) you are on , not which direction it is.

"A/N remember that aviators?"

Sure along with "double the angle off the bow" and other antique systems.
I liked Consolan , although the entire Atlantic was on a foot wide chart , so a pencil line could be 15 miles wide

Still a winter run to Bermuda and on south was was easy ,

FF said:

"holding the radio in front of you and rotating your body until the station disappears or signal almost disappears, then that particular station will be....,

Click to expand...

I see a lot of this near Lake Boca. No wait, i think they are just shielding their phones from the sun to check out the latest instagram posts.

lwilham said:

Thanks for all the replies. We have numerous handheld GPS nav tools, so the navigation isn’t the issue, its that all the stuff went down at once. New boat for us, and about half the systems are head scratchers (no redundancy if they all feed from the same unit, etc.). Could be the damned bananas on the boat too... [emoji848]

Click to expand...

It's not the bananas.

Several months ago, I had something similar happen, twice in one day. All my electronics reset at once. They came back on, and were fine after that.

Fast forward several months. My inverter was acting up - acting like it didn't have enough power in the 12V house bank to make AC power, even for small things. I called Magnum, they said to check all the cables between the batteries and the inverter. Guess what? The main cable connecting my house bank to the positive buss (from which EVERYTHING gets its 12V power) had a bad crimp at the battery end, and showed evidence of having been burnt / melted at some point in the past. It was definitely warmer than anything else in the vicinity.

I replaced that cable and the inverter issue went away. And then I remembered the total electronics shutdown from several months before, and wondered if the incident that causes the cable to burn could have caused the shutdown, too. So, it's worth looking at all of your battery cables, from battery to battery, and from the bank to all other busses. Also, the wire (cable) that provides power to the breaker(s) that control your electronics.

Now, if the issue was simply that you lost all of your GPS signals, but the screens never went off.... nevermind!

lwilham said:

I posted this over at AGLCA too...

Had a weird glitch yesterday, and lost all my systems at once. Running from the flybridge and my Furuno GPS unit, which we were using for depth and speed went black. Went into pilothouse, and my Garmin 6212 had stopped navigating and my identical Furuno down there also not working. I have an older Furuno unit down there as well, it would power on, but no GPS data. Also noticed my GPS info on my VHF not working.

Click to expand...

On my last boat I carried a backup GPS + a sextant + a backup plastic sextant in the abandon ship bag. Had full-size, plus book charts & cruising guides of all areas. Assume I will rig a similar setup, though updated, in the next boat. Last I heard, airline pilots also carry sextants.

Imp said:

.. Last I heard, airline pilots also carry sextants.

Click to expand...

WWII army air corp A10 sextant.

Not sure about modern times though..

Thanks again for all the replies. Looks like I'll start tracing down all the power issues when I get back on the boat next month. The learning curve is pretty steep right now. Once we move onboard full time, I hope to be able to slow down and think through things more deliberately...