electronics Archives

Garmin autopilot doesn’t want to play

August 2, 2013 Repairs and Breakdowns

When Liberation was launched in Isola, one of the things which needed to be done as part of the first sea trial was calibration of the auto-pilot. Calibration involves putting the the system into setup mode and following the instructions on the screen – you drive the boat in large circles in one direction, then you turn and drive in circles in the opposite direction, followed by turning left and turning right and zig-zagging. When the programme is complete the unit confirms the calibration and it is then capable of driving the boat as it should. During the sea-trial this calibration failed and Keto were unable to achieve a working auto-pilot – Ed crossed the border into Croatia with manual …….

Furuno Network Commissioning

August 1, 2013 Commissioning, Repairs and Breakdowns, Technical

As I wrote earlier, the Furuno TZT14 MFD has an issue with serious delamination of the screen and we have been in touch with Furuno to negotiate an exchange under the warranty. This is not quite as simple as it should be – of course we purchased the unit from a bulk distributor instead of directly from Furuno – and we installed it ourselves and didn’t have it done by a qualified Furuno installer. In addition, the unit is outside of the UK where it was purchased – all of which made the situation more complicated. Of course Furuno have “worldwide warranty” – but there are lots of conditions attached to this. First of all, for the warranty to be valid, an …….

Successful anchoring technique – our way

July 31, 2013 Captains Log, Navigation, Techniques

Our preference is to always stay at anchor – and this is something we have done with all our boats so we have lots of experience of what works for us and we are very pedantic about our alarms so we can get a good nights sleep without worry. In this blog, I’m sharing our technique and how we use our technology to help ….. Anchoring Hardware and the Basic Principles We use a Jambo anchor – the question “which is the best anchor” is one that will always create a lot of controversy with the boating community and everyone has his own opinion. The truth is that the best anchor to use will depend on the sea bed – …….

Electronics installation … the biggie!

June 30, 2013 Commissioning, Technical

It’s taken us a month to complete the installation of the electronics from start to finish of course with lots of other jobs in between as it made sense doing several things at once while we had bits of the boat open. Some of the items had not arrived when they should have – for example the Bullet WiFi booster had been shipped from the US to our office in France and for some reason UPS had decided to send it back to the supplier as duty and VAT was due to be paid, rather than delivering it to us and asking for payment. With a lot of backwards and forwards, the unit was re-delivered eventually – but too late …….