autopilot

[sail4dale]

Raymarine 4000+ autopilot after working for a period of time, suddenly shows huge 10 plus lines of off course on the meter and veers over 80 degrees trying to correct the course. The lines show a port error (left on the meter) and boat veers to starboard.

Alternately, between these occurrances, the compass course on the autohelm meter makes changes from the magnetic course the boat is traveling. The meter does not hold a realigned input for any period of time. The readouit randomly goes in either direction and requires a new input for alignment.

During todays trip, "no fix" appeared several times on my chart and to get the GPS to reaquire, I had to shut down the system at the switch panel. Stopping it on the instrument did not reactivate the gps.

Sound familiar to anyone out there?

[tonywright]

Haven't run the autopilot long enough to give real opinion on that. I do get a wander back and forth of 2-3 degrees, leaving a zig-zag wake.

RE No fix. This has happened to me twice. rebooting the Chartplotter (I have the RL80CRC) fixed the problem on each occasion. I recently discovered the "restart GPS" function in section 6.9 of the manual, but haven't tried it yet.  If anyone has an idea on why this occurs, I would love to hear it.

Tony

[Stu Jackson]

Please do a search on "Catalina Cocktail" -- it's a basic settings setup recommended by Raymarine to Catalina owners to make the dang things work and stop wandering all over the place.

Re-initialization is always a good idea, too.

[David Sanner]

The cocktail supposedly goes something like this:

    Rudder Gain    2
    Response        2
    AutoTrim          2
    Drive Type       2

...  all 2's

[sail4dale]

did it.  It's now back at Raytheon 

[Skipperjay]

This is very odd. My chartplotter/GPS did the exact same thing Sunday 7/29 During todays trip, "no fix" appeared several times on my chart and to get the GPS to reaquire, I had to shut down the system at the switch panel. Stopping it on the instrument did not reactivate the gps. Very curious. I did reboot it and it worked temporarily but then malfunctioned again. Could not get a SOL reading.

[sail4dale]

  update,  The factory says they couldn't find anything wrong.

suggested I reinstall and get the deviation under the 12 degrees I had it on.  I guess I'll have to relocate the fluxgate to accomplish that.  I've never been able to get it under 10 since I bought the boat.

Also set the variable all to 2's that means 2,2,2 & 2

[BillG]

Where is your fluxgate located?

[sail4dale]

I have it mounted low in the wet locker aft of the nav station.  seemed like a good place away from electrical cables, etc

[tonywright]

Had another episode of "lost fix" this weekend. It seemed to happen about the same location as last time, so now I am on the trail of some mysterious local black hole in the GPS signal.

But the fix was quickly re-acquired without intervention. Then it happened again, and was not to quick to re-acquire. So I looked around. Someone who shall remain nameless had taken a perch on the rail seat next to the GPS antenna, and found the antenna to be a great armrest. It seems that an elbow is enough to disrupt the GPS signal!  Sure enough, as soon as the arm was moved, the fix was back! 

May all your GPS problems be so simple!

Tony

[sedelange]

Brings up a good question.  Where is the best place to mount the GPS antenna if you have the rail seats?

[Steve Sayian]

Steve,
On my MKII the GPS antenna is mounted on an Edson pole with the radar on the stern.  No problems with anything blocking antenna (see attached picture).

Steve

[Kyle Ewing]

A friend had a problem with his Raymarine chartplotter/GPS (don't remember the model but this was in 2002 or so) losing fix.  It got progressively worse until it was unusable.  Turns out there's a battery inside that periodically needs replacing.  It was sent back to the factory for repair then worked fine.