New Navionics Platinum+ on Classic E-80

[lotharjt]

I'd like to chime in on this thread. One, I was encountering the same problem and Mr Russo. I have an E-120 master and two slave E-80s. With the new Navionics + card, the system was much slower to boot and many times the slave units would never fully boot, they would eventually freeze on the OK screen.

The moderators link to the FAQ on this topic is 100% spot in. I followed the recommendation and deleted the full nav data set from my new card, then used the Navionics "Chart Installer" application to load my area of operation / interest. It amounted to 253 MBytes of data, far less than the 2 GBytes limit that was tested by Raymarine.

I took this to the vessel. On the first power up, the system took 2 minutes to come up with the E-120 master doing one soft reset in the process and the slave E-80s squawking that there is no master. Yet after two minutes, the E-120 was operation and the E-80s were happy and fully operational.

Then on subsequent power cycles, the entire system would come up with 40 seconds, reliably every time, just like it did with my ten year old Platinum card.

My conclusions: excellent FAQ thread, it was spot on. And Navionics support folks are putting out bad data, they know nothing of this issue and will insist that the 16 GByte cards are compatible with the E classic plotters. While technically true, what is missing in the conversation with them is the amount of data on the card, not the size of the card.

Someone from Raymarine and Navionics should get together and update the respective compatibility info so that it doesn't mislead the many users out there. I learned it through diligent investigation and having an electronics / programming background. Many others will be snowed by the problem and simply give up or spend senseless money paying someone to figure it out.

All the best,

Lothar