[TG] TG11] E120- DSM 300 setup issues

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Hello,
I have an E120 that was throwing DSM communication lost signals.
We sent the E120 to Raymarine twice. They said the unit was fine.
I then saw lots of complaints (on line) about the DSM 300. We bought a used unit from a used electronics place in Florida.
The "new unit" showed "ping disabled" and would not give any sounder readings.
We sent it back and they replaced it. The next new unit did the same thing.
I tried to enable Ping on the ESM and it will not accept the change.
When you try to reset the DSM nothing happens. You get the "yes" option on the keys but, even though the button beeps, it does not reset the DSM.
I did factory reset on the E120 and nothing changes.
I reinstall the old DSM and I have a sounder reading but if I try to disable ping on this unit I cannot change anything here either.
I also cannot change the transducer (which is not correct) or make any other changes to either the fish finder menu or the DSM menu.
You can highlight the change and the OK button beeps and closes the option but it doesn't change the set up.
Am I missing something simple?

Thanks in advance. Raymarine doesn't support these devices anymore which is very frustrating as they did charge $800. to repair it less than a year ago.

Peter

[Tom - Raymarine - Moderator]

Hello Peter,

DSMs had their problems - mostly with earlier build-quality and software - but they weren't as black as they were painted. Most DSM issues with newer DSMs were something other than a broken DSM. Here is a collection of DSM faultfinding info that I put together many years ago to address these. No, you're not missing something simple, the contents of that document were hard-won from diagnosing many dozens of similar issues over several years.

On your specific problems:

Quote:The "new unit" showed "ping disabled" and would not give any sounder readings.

Pings Disabled means either that you have intermittent or partial network connections between the DSM and display, or that your DSM is not detecting a correct Sense resistor within the transducer. Looking at the diagnostic LED on the DSM will generally show which: 4 amber flashes (assuming the DSM is running latest v4.20 software) means a network issue, 1 amber flash means a transducer sense resistance issue. More details in the link above.

Quote:I tried to enable Ping on the ESM and it will not accept the change.
When you try to reset the DSM nothing happens. You get the "yes" option on the keys but, even though the button beeps, it does not reset the DSM.
I did factory reset on the E120 and nothing changes.
I reinstall the old DSM and I have a sounder reading but if I try to disable ping on this unit I cannot change anything here either.
I also cannot change the transducer (which is not correct) or make any other changes to either the fish finder menu or the DSM menu.
You can highlight the change and the OK button beeps and closes the option but it doesn't change the set up.

These are all symptoms of 1-way network communications: the E120 is receiving network data from the DSM, but the DSM is not receiving data from the E120. All of these settings are held within the DSM, so if the display sends an instruction to the DSM and it doesn't reply saying that the change has been accepted, nothing changes on the E120.

Given that both symptoms could come down to the same thing (as well as the original DSM Connection Lost alarms) - unreliable network comms - I would be checking there first. There's more detail in the doc above, but aside from the DSM itself (which, if it's been swapped without improvement, is probably not the culprit), the STHS cables, crossover-coupler or network switch and internal STHS flexi within the E120 are all known causes for this sort of issue and are suspect. Have a look at the latter 4 rows in the table in the section DSM Connection Lost and let me know if you have any questions.

Regards,
Tom