The Offshore Voyaging Reference Site

6 Tips To Stop Marine Electronics From Ruining Your Cruise

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If you really want to get out there voyaging, and enjoy the journey when you do, you need to think carefully about how you use your precious maintenance time. But there is a trap lurking that can waste huge amounts of your time and money:

The reliability of modern marine electronics is simply abysmal.

But this is not a rant to make me feel better about this situation. Rather, in this chapter, I’m going to give you some solid tips, based on 30 years of marine electronic use, that will help you avoid letting these machines ruin your cruise.

Defining The Problem

The first step to dealing with any problem is recognizing it. So recognize that marine electronics are way less reliable than just about any other machine that you will be exposed to in your daily life. Probably an order of magnitude less reliable than:

  • Your car.
  • Your smartphone.
  • Your household electronics.
  • Your diesel engine.
  • Yes, even more unreliable than your Windows computer. Ouch, who said that?
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How can I say that? Well, over the years, the vast majority of the marine electronics we have bought and installed have not worked:

  • Northstar GPS (best money could buy at the time): back to the factory, twice.
  • Simrad Autopilot: full rebuild required in first year (poor dealer installation).
  • Lopo Light: four new lights over 5 years. (I classed this as electronic, not electrical, because of the sophisticated circuitry these lights contain.)
  • ICS Navtex: Poor receiver, eventually replaced with Furuno.
  • EchoPilot Forward Scan Sonar: first sensor was weak. Two more sensors have failed in 15 years.
  • Icom SSB radio: weeks of frustration trouble shooting stray RF.
  • Nexus Sailing instruments: Software bugs that rendered half the displays inoperable.
  • Vesper Marine AIS transponder: back to the factory twice, finally fixed (we hope) with a new unit after three years of intermittent problems.
  • Furuno Radar: Funky software problem that threw up strange error messages. Learned to live with that one since it does not effect operation.
  • Syrens WiFi hub system: software so buggy that it was initially unusable. Still doesn’t work that well.
  • Siren boat monitoring system: First two units defective. (Looks like a very cool piece of kit; report coming as soon as we get one that works.)

That’s all that comes to mind right now, but I’m sure there were more.

And it’s not just us. When Ben Ellison of Panbo and Gizmo fame has a cruise from hell like this…well, what can you say? If he can’t get this stuff to work right the first time…

And then there is our own Colin Speedie, AAC European Correspondent, who is one of the nicest and most tolerant people on the planet…until you ask him about his Simrad autopilot.

All in all, it’s an abysmal situation. But given that marine electronic manufacturers are selling to a limited volume market that demands continuous innovation—not exactly a recipe for reliability—things are probably not going to get any better, so let’s look at what we voyagers can do to live with the problem.


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Nick Kats

Electronics, in my case:
Never owned or used a chart plotter, always use paper charts.
Fish finder is backed by lead & line, eyeballing the water & coastal navigation.
Running lights are backed up by kero running lights, and by powerful flashlights (AA battery LED, or another flashlight which is hooked up to the 24V battery) – shine on sail for max visibility. In empty seas, or in high latitudes with no darkness, or with a night watch, running lights are a non issue.
Have a VHF – am indifferent to whether it works.
Have a CARD – a radar detector – more often than not it doesn’t work, doesn’t bother me.
For bad weather I have no weather forecasting electronics. I depend on the barometer, eyeballing the sky & a strong boat.
The only essential electronic kit on my boat is the handheld GPS – it runs on AAA batteries & I have two. If the GPS system crashes when I’m offshore, I can run down latitude to the estimated longitude, then turn 90 degrees, be fun to do. If on the coast, coastal navigation is sufficient.
In short, I don’t stressed over electronics.
Actually I enjoy sailing much more when electronics (and battery banks and/or the engine) fails.

Simon Fraser

Isn’t having 2 AAA batteries is a bit extravagant…..?
Cheers

Nick Kats

Hi Simon
I mean 2 handheld GPS. I carry a litre or so of AA & AAA batteries.

Frank M

An eminently sensible view of marine electronics and very sage advice, especially on the updates and new equipment front.
However, as a (non-marine) electronics engineer with years of fault-finding experience on various boats, I find that 99% of all “electronic” faults are really mechanical, poor installation or set-up, in nature. The actual electronics are “usually” highly reliable.
The mechanical issues are most often just poor connections, especially RF connectors (where connector blocks are used in-place of proper Coaxial/BNC connectors). Badly made crimps, damp joints or poor soldering are common problems.
Installers often don’t understand the importance of a proper RF ground or earth, which leads to poor performance of radios, GPS, radar, Navtex & WiFi. Modern Switched Mode Power supplies & Battery chargers can cause horrible RF interference which will degrade the performance of other equipment dramatically, unless installed correctly.
Dealer and User set-up issues are also commonplace and can often appear as a hardware fault.
Sadly with the ever increasing complexity of on-board systems and the use of non-marine connectors (USB, Ethernet etc) these faults are becoming more common. However, don’t despair: learn to use a multi-meter, buy a can of switch cleaner and sort out the mechanics before you send a unit back for repair and most important of all, get a decent marine technician with a good reputation to do any installation work.

RobertB

Frank,
I agree with your points and Johns. Electronic components are highly reliable. I very rarely see them fail if operated within their specs. However, I do see them routinely fry because of poor circuit design and lack of power protection. And firmware updates rarely get the testing they should before getting shipped so problems are not uncommon. This isn’t restricted to marine electronics and the advice of installing/updating a long time before you need them is prudent for any critical system.

Marc Dacey

Good points, all, although with a teenager aboard who must use SailMail to file and receive homework, a case is made for us to continue with SSB. I dislike integration on the basis of unnecessary complexity (the “trap of convenience” as some say) and because making the AP go to a GPS waypoint is, anecdotally speaking, just asking for trouble in my view. Set the AP to steer to a heading, on the other hand, and if you are a mile east of your expected waypoint, you’ve learned something about current or leeway or even that your fluxgate compass needs adjustment.

I also concur with the issue of installation being sub-par. I’m a big fan of robust connectors, conformal spray and all the “post-consumer” techniques of keeping the salt air out.

Regarding radars: I was told a couple of years back that the most sensible thing I could do was to have a new “digital” radar for close-in work under six to 10 NM range, as the resolution (and comparatively modest power draw) was superior, but if I wanted to see a 22-knot freighter 20 NM away in the ocean, or to get useful warning of squall lines, keeping a pulse radar of the Furuno or Koden type would be a better choice! It seems each type has its strengths, but the weaknesses are rarely discussed in the rush to “upgrade”. Of course, if you are coastal only, the choice for a low-draw, short- to mid-range radar is easy. Offshore, less so.

Lastly, I have the somewhat cynical viewpoint that it might be better to purchase at the low end of the “pro” market, such as commercial boats, fishing boats, etc. than in the consumer side (Raymarine, etc.). The fact is that if the fishermen diss your autopilot, you are going to alienate your best customers, whereas if some retiree in a Beneteau ends up in Nassau for three weeks troubleshooting a Raymarine AP…well, that complaint has fewer real-world consequences. That’s why for APs, I’m looking at W-H or ComNav, semi-pro gear that does fewer things arguably better than less robust and more feature-ridden Garmin/Raymarine and so on.

Marc Dacey

John, that Furuno 1832 unit shows we are in concord on the idea of the passagemaker’s “sweet spot” for electronics is the lower end of the commercial range, rather than the boat show special. I salvaged a Furuno 1720 unit literally out of a bin, and I expect to get it working this winter as “a good start”. It’s why I follow the fishermen: as you correctly pointed out: “Commercial fishermen just don’t put up with crap that does not work.” The question is, why do recreational sailors put up with anything less?

As for the SSB, I have a steel boat and I can expect better than usual performance for obtaining GRIB files/wxfax and doing e-mail and accessing cruiser nets. There are certain safety advantages, too, in my mind to using SSB for a few years yet. That said, I wouldn’t NOT have a satphone for the ditch bag or for medical emergency situations where the cost is irrelevant, but data over satphone versus SailMail is still in my calculations prohibitive. Like AIS and RADAR, I think SSB and satphone are more complimentary than antagonistic. Given our five-year plan, it could very well be that I use the SSB a lot at the beginning, and less so at the end, much as how I saw a lot of sextants when I started sailing, and now hardly any!

Marc Dacey

The mast is in the rack at the moment, but I should get on this next season. If I hit any wobblies, I’ll seek outside guidance from a radio expert I know. A couple of guys have seen the boat and proclaimed it an excellent base…if I keep my cabling short.

John Pedersen

I agree with the KISS aspect. I have no plotter – just a Thinkpad with the standard HD replaced with a solid state HD. And a spare, with the same setup. I keep it indoors, and have a window in the saloon so that I can see it from the cockpit in bad weather. I’ve probably got half a dozen GPS’s on board, including a couple of phones – but I wouldn’t like to go to sea without my sextant. I vaguely remember how to use it. I hope to revise that way of navigating before lightning strikes and possibly renders all electrickery useless.

If I was in the market for another boat, I’d prefer not to pay for a whole pile of inter-linked hardware that is going out of date and that I couldn’t rely on. When I see an ad saying a boat has just been fitted out with all the latest navigational toys, I pretty much rule it out.

Richard Dykiel

I learned celestial nav with starpath.com, Even if you don’t sign up for the online course, I find their textbook a great learning tool. No, I don’t own shares in starpath,com.

richard s. (s/v lakota)

i tend to agree with marc’s post above in that correct installation is likely a major culprit with these problems; however, my feeling is that the equipment should not be so sensitive to this…the engineers and designers for this equipment appear to be content with good reliability so long as the installation is beyond reproach, and this is not acceptable in my view because it is so unlikely…as far as i am concerned these supposed gurus remain on the hook for all this poor reliability until the equipment is robust enough to tolerate some installation lapses

also i endorse the kiss principle in john’s book, but i did splurge with lakota (dufour 425) and installed a watermaker (spectra)…bad move…the darn thing is obstinate, unpredictable, and is not functional much more than it is functional…mfr continuously claims minor adjustments will correct the problems, but they are essentially not interested as if they really don’t know the origin of the problems, which, i believe, is probably the case…my guess is this is a common dilemma regardless of brand

Marc Dacey

Recent time spent in Antigua talking to active cruisers has persuaded me that tropics passagemaking means a watermaker is very desirable. The key to happy watermakers seems to involve regular, predictable use, which is the diesel paradigm.

That said, I would always have a tank devoted to collected rainwater for washing up, showers and laundry. Something I could boil if the watermaker went down!

Colin Speedie

Hi Marc
I think there are three key points to a happy relationship with your water maker.
1. Buy a simple one – as Dick Stevenson remarks elsewhere here most of the ‘labour saving’ extras are more trouble than they’re worth.
2. Install it properly, and that means close to the batteries (if 12V) and with adequate cabling – voltage sensitivity is an issue with many models.
3. Follow the manufacturers instructions religiously in terms of regular use, filters, storage and servicing.

Being able to inspect the unit when you make water (demanded by a simple installation) will nip many problems in the bud before they become serious.
I installed our basic Spectra Ventura 150 myself and it has been a model of reliability, and still (after 7 years) makes water within 10% 0f the test spec sheet it came with.
As is so often the case, complexity is not your friend here…
Best wishes
Colin