[TG] [TG11] Speed Transducer Not Reading

[Soulcaptain]

I was encourage by my tech to swap out my 5 year old Airmar paddle wheel for a new Ultrasonic unit. "No more fussing about with a fouled wheel," he said. Well, after the install, the speed appeared on the Multifunction Chartplotter, but he never was able to get the reading on my network of three repeaters. I lived with it for the remaining month of last season. This season, the speed reads zero on all devises and the tech is avoiding my calls. He says it's a software issue. My boat is a 2013, hardly ancient. I've read the manuals and followed the directions....still no luck. Any thoughts on the fix?

[Tom - Raymarine - Moderator]

Hello Soulcaptain,

On the different values you were seeing before, it would be good to know:

1. What kind of multifunction display you have, and what models the repeaters are?
2. How these are connected together?
3. Where/how the ultrasonic speed is connected into the system?
   

Back in the days when Raymarine supplied ultrasonic transducers - we haven't done so for around 10 years - the ones we used output an analogue signal which was picked up by a display (e.g. an ST60+ Speed) and then converted to a digital value on the Seatalk network. If your transducer is analogue then zero values could mean an issue with this analogue speed signal, which would need to be checked with a multimeter or ideally an oscilloscope. If on the other hand your transducer is a 'smart' version outputting NMEA2000 then the problem must lie in the transducer, unless you still had another source of speed data somewhere in the system that were overriding it.
Do you have water temperature data, and if so, does this change if you remove the ultrasonic from the housing and gently warm it? This is a test to confirm that the data is coming from where it ought to be, not another source.

Regards,
Tom