Be Prepared For Your Next Cruise Trip!
Do you have it all set and checked for a one-week cruise trip or a fishing trip with friends, but you are aware of that minor or that problems that could possibly happen during the trip? We never know what challenges we would be facing or what if one of our display devices goes down, especially when we are using an Axiom for fishing, and if it goes down, the whole trip could be sabotaged. Of course, we eventually have a backup, but what if we aren’t prepared to deal with the predicament when we are stranded in the middle of a deep ocean surrounded by darkness to our eye’s vicinity.
Don’t worry! We have got you covered. We will discuss a bunch of problems or failures that happen when you are cruising in your yacht or ship.
Causes of Poor GPS Fix Accuracy
Several factors lead to poor accuracy of your positional fix in the Raymarine device’s. You can improve the GPS fix to an extent or at least know what’s causing them.
Weather attenuation & sea-state
A big drop in GPS accuracy happens majorly due to atmospheric and weather conditions. Most signal loss is due to bad or faulty cables
Boat movement & Background noise levels
The GPS fix quality keeps fluctuating majorly due to the boat movement and the ever-changing path, which leads to change in the satellite signal level.
If there’s another factor contributing to a poor GPS fix, it is due to the background noise levels.
You might be thinking about what possibly could cause RF noise in your boat?
EVERYTHING including USB chargers, LED light drivers, compressors, inverters, VHF radios, battery chargers, and radars.
Wrong GNSS receiver selected
Advanced technology can also be such a bummer sometimes! Because sometimes, we can accidentally choose the wrong GPS receiver. There are a lot of satellites like the Indian GAGAN, US WAAS, etc., so when you use a differential GPS option, this can cause your Raymarine MFD to havea problem by toggling between the low and high accuracy of the GNSS satellite signal. Anyway It’s better to keep your differential GPS OFF to avoid any detour from your trip.
Causes of poor performance of your multifunctional device
Well, if it’s not the GPS problem, what other issues are you facing with your multifunctional device? A few factors are contributing to high noise and low signal leading to poor performance.
Failing transducer acoustic element
A transducer might produce low output when it has a faulty acoustic element, or there’s a failure. A failure of the transducer can happen for several reasons; get it tested before starting your trip. If you have a shoot through transducer is it housing filled correctly
Hull vibration causing high noise
Resonant vibrations are picked up by the transducer, mainly because of the hull where the transducer was placed. Even if you have moved your transducer 100 times, the hull vibration produced will be picked up by the transducer; it’s better to have a rubber (anti-vibrating) mount to avoid this problem.
For a smooth sailing
Raymarine multifunctional devices (MFD), fish finders, and other marine electronic equipment are manufactured. In rare instances, the power surges resulting from the operation of equipment having high current demands may adversely affect the performance and longevity of marine electronics.
In the event of any system component failure or critical failure of any system, you have to make sure you have installed your marine electronics in a way that can support or withstand any system failure for smooth sailing.