Brand New System - Bizarre wind readings

[jeffhare]

Hello,

We had a new RM system professionally installed last fall.

EV-200 Sail / T1 Linear drive with p70 head
I70 SailPack Depth/Speed/Wind
ITC-5,
2 - i70 display units
RD418 Radar

Kept our C90W for the time being but are planning to upgrade it also...

Everything appears to work great each time we head out ...for a while. After some period of time (1-4 hours), the wind display just freaks out and becomes useless for the remainder of the trip. Everything else is still fine.

I took a short video of what starts happening after a while.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HI722tBB3l4

The power quality and voltage is not likely the problem as we have a ~400amp house battery system that runs everything for days before needing a boost.

I believe new supply & ground wiring was done from dedicated breakers for each major component. Makes no difference whether we have the AP or Radar powered up or not.

We tried powering down the entire system and then restarting just the instruments and it made no difference. Only seems to recover after being powered off for some unknown period of time like overnight.

All the equipment is registered and under warranty (3 yrs) but need to know how to get this working reliably. What should my next steps be here?

Thanks so much for any info you can provide!
-Jeff & Michelle

[Chuck - Raymarine - Moderator]

Welcome to the Raymarine Forum Jeff,

Raymarine's engineering team is currently investigating the reported issue on more than one vessel and it may be linked to local RF interference. It has been recommended that the problem may be worked around by unplugging the wind transducer's ground lead from the iTC-5 Wind ground (silver) terminal and instead connect this lead to the iTC-5 Depth ground (silver) terminal. As your system includes a depth transducer, the wind transducer ground lead and depth transducer ground lead will both be inserted into the 1/8" female spade connector which will be connected to the iTC-5 Depth ground (silver) terminal.

[jeffhare]

I will try that. Interesting information though. The ITC-5 is mounted vertically right behind the VHF radio. Aprox 6" away and also about 6" away from a Jensen MS2013BTR marine AM/FM stereo. The VHF in question is an ICOM IC-M506-21 (AIS Reciever). I will also double check that the ITC-5 and the VHF have dedicated ground wires back to the electrical panel and don't daisy chain (even though the total run back to the panel is less than 30").

On most of our recent trips where the wind instrument started acting up, we never transmitted over VHF and may or may not have had the stereo on (but that doesn't mean there wasn't still some interference). In case any of this data helps...

[Chuck - Raymarine - Moderator]

Jeff,

You're welcome. Thanks for the additional information regarding your system.

[jeffhare]

Followup on this problem.

Recap, the wind speed readings (and sometimes the depth readings) would go completely haywire.

We have an Evolution Linear drive system with rudder position sensor, and the I70 depth, speed and wind instruments.

After removing the ITC-5 cover I could see that the bare shield wire connection for the depth sender was likely making some contact with various unused pins of the rudder sensor, either all the time or with vibration.

The bare ground wire from the Depth sender entered from the left, looped above the rudder sensor pins and around to the ground/screen pin of the depth sensor. It was very likely contacting or shorting or in close proximity to various rudder sensor pins (possibly even contacting the left most Compass connector pin). Neither the rudder sensor or compass senders are connected to the ITC-5 in our installation, as I think they connect directly to the Evolution ACU.

We tried everything we could think of to introduce interference, VHF transmission, Radar, handheld VHF in close proximity, etc. and were no longer seeing any erratic readings over 7 days of sailing & motor sailing in a wide variety of wind and sea conditions.

See the attached image.

So... Maybe this is solved?

[Chuck - Raymarine - Moderator]

Jeff,

You may well have identified the cause of the reported issue. Please keep us updated.