[TG] [TG11] Lighthouse 3 locking up and crashing

[Chris.au]

When I first installed my system 4 years ago, I had two eS98 mfd's, which behaved well. The screen resolution was optimal for am 9" screen. A year ago, the screen in the cockpit mounted eS98 failed and I had to upgrade this mfd to an Axiom Pro. This meant upgrading the software for both mfd's to Lighthouse 2. Whilst the menu structure in the original software was a bit convoluted, there were no major bugs and for me, there have been NO benefits in migrating to Lighthouse 2 and 3. I have experienced several significant problems: the software locks up or crashes at least once a day so that as a safety precaution, if I am approaching an area where navigation is critical, I will power down/up the system to minimise the risk of it crashing at a vital moment. For the first time, I tried following a route that I had created. Maybe it was a coincidence, but when an AIS alarm occurred, the entire system locked up. I could not clear the alarm. I could not return to the home screen. I could not power down the mfd using the power button. I had to turn off power at the switch board to reset the fault. This is just not good enough. Quite frankly, from a cruising sailors point of view, I think that Raymarine have totally lost the plot. Every software upgrade adds useless functions which as far as I can see, simply slows down the system and makes it less stable. What I want is an absolutely rock solid chart plotter and the Axiom Pro is nowhere near that. I find myself using my Samsung Galaxy S9 with Navionics Charts for many functions in preference to my Raymarine mfd with Lighthouse 3. Ican only conclude that the cruising sailor is now an insignificant sector of the MFD market and that it is more important to be able control my Fusion Sound system from the MFD than it is to be able to measure distances on a chart. Maybe I'm old-school, but I have no desire to use my MFD as a remote control for my sound system. I would dearly love to be able to use my MFD as a full function remote control for my autopilot, but the AP control capability available through lighthouse 3 is next to useless.
If all this sounds negative it's because after 4 years experience with Raymarine's mfd's, I have little to be positive about. I regret not going with B&G or perhaps a PC based navigation system, which would have been much less expensive and far more capable.

[Tom - Raymarine - Moderator]

Hello Chris,

I'm sorry to hear that you're not happy with your Lighthouse 3 system. The level of software crashes that you're describing is not normal or expected for LH3, so I'm confident that we can improve matters for you.

The first step to doing so is to find out what version of LH3 your system is running now. We release new software updates approximately every 3 months and each one fixes bugs that have been identified (with the best will in the world, almost all software systems contain bugs) as well as adding new features. The latest software is v3.10.42 and if your system's running an earlier than this (and in particular if your displays weren't running the same version software as this is a known cause for instability) then we need to get your system onto the latest software and see what happens then.

If the problem still remains, the next step would be to extract 'crash logs' from your system so that we see what's causing the crashes. Each time the system crashes a diagnostic file is created that describes to our software engineers what was happening in the run-up to the crash, and this is what we use to find the causes of problems and fix them.

Last, after crash-logs have been extracted, we would ask you to back-up your system's data and configuration and then perform a factory reset. This is in case the crashes are being caused by incorrect internal configuration and allow the system to start afresh. You can of course re-install your data afterwards.

Attached is a document which describes how to save crash logs, back up data and perform a reset. If you are able to follow this and get the crash logs back to me, I'll take a look and see if we can see what's causing the unreliability in your system. If it's a previously-unknown problem I will log it to our issue-tracking database for resolution.

Regarding the crash when an AIS alarm was received: does there seem to be a pattern there? There is one particular type of non-Raymarine AIS which is known to output corrupted NMEA2000 data under some circumstances and when received by our displays, this can cause our MFD to crash as it attempts to decode invalid data. If the AIS isn't Raymarine, does the reliability of the system improve if the AIS is temporarily unplugged from the system?

I'd like to finish by saying that although software bugs certainly may and probably do exist in latest LH3.10, the level of unreliability you're seeing is not normal and not what we want or intend for Raymarine owners and users to experience.

Regards,
Tom