GPS / Sounder Deal

[Captain Steve]

Duane, in sunny Channel Islands the temp has been reaching below freezing. Should I be putting a sock on my temp/speed probe to protect it? What do you use in the great norhtwest?

[Duane Dunn, Allegro]

Mines out of the water on the trailer. I don't think below freezing temps will hurt it. Since there isn't any heat source to trap heat from I doubt a sock would do much good.

We've been down in the teens here as well. Finally back up to the mid 30's and the cold rain is slowly washing away the snow and ice.

Once we get back into the 40's I need to check out the boat, particularly the water lines and make sure everything survived our 5 day stretch of teens and 20's. I have a small 150w heater fan always running that eliminates condensation moisture during the winter. It usually easily keeps things warm enough when the temps dip to freezing, but I don't know if it had enough punch to keep things from turning solid during the extended cold.

Between two bouts of snow and the big windstorm the kids are now up to 7 days of missed school. And we're not even through the first month of winter. They will most likely be going to school into July.

[Captain Steve]

with over 10,500 views...just wanted to bring it up to the top again!!!

[Highlander]

I've had my fishing boat sit outside in -45C and never covered any of the transducers the rest of the electrical eqiup. comes inside

John

[beene]

I've had my fishing boat sit outside in -45C

Where the heck were you?? -45C.... forget the fishing boat and just use an ice fishing hut

I can't remember it ever getting below -20 something. Then again.... sorry and you are?????

G

[Alex]

May be it was -45F ?

[Shane]

May be it was -45F ?

Not much differerence. IIRC, isn't -40F and -40C the equalling point?

[Catigale]

correct...they are both f**** cold.....but -40 happens to be the crossing point....

[Shane]

correct...they are both f**** cold.....but -40 happens to be the crossing point....

Thanks Catigale,

I knew I didn't word it correctly, but was drawing a blank on the right term to use.

[eric3a]

,,

[Catigale]

IIRC correctly its also the temp where if you spit, it will freeze before it hits the ground...

[beene]

Ya

Lived in Winnipeg, Man, Can. for a while where you would often see a sweet 16 on her way to Catholic school with those tiny skirt uniforms and would be standing on the corner in -40c, wind just howling, smokin a sig without a clue in the world. Guess she was already numb, between the ears that is.

Me, tripple goose down parka, in a heated car, tinkin... maybe I should offer her a lift..... u know... cuz it wuz could like....

[Duane Dunn, Allegro]

Ok, I have both the NMEA 183 connection and the speed sensor working hooked up to the single communications port.

I've worked out out two possible wiring methods.

The first is what I have hooked up and working. It uses the optional NDC-4 NMEA cable from www.LEI-Extras.com . It is probably the more difficult way to wire things up, but using the NMEA cable keeps what I think is a diode they have inline on the transmit leg of the cable. I assume this is blocking a signal from going up stream on the transmit leg, but I'm no electronics expert.

The second is a simpler method where you would enter the speed sensor cable mid way and tap into two of the conductors. Electrically it gives you the same connections but does not have the diode so use it at your own risk.

I simply used a 4 terminal screw block to make the 4 connections shown on the first picture. That way I can easily add other send or receive devices in the future by just adding wires to the screw terminals. You could also solder the wires for increased reliability.

I'll be able to give everything a good test on our trip next week, but sitting on the trailer everything seems to work. When my kids spin the speed wheel I get a readout on the display. When I select a waypoint to go to and put the autopilot in Nav mode it syncs up and asks for permission to make a turn. That's about all I can test without the boat in the water.

Also in one of the many GPS threads I stated that my speed sensor was a speed/temp sensor. This is wrong. My old GPS had this sensor. The Eagle SeaChamp 2000C DF I have has a speed only sensor. The temp is in the DF transducer. Yet another reason to keep it in the water, not mounted in shoot through the hull mode. We like to see how cold the water is up here.

Click the pictures for the bigger version.

[Tahoe Jack]

Damn Duane....some seriously high quality graphics!! Looking forward to your on-water test. BTW, patching in a diode shouldn't be too tough in option 2 however we would need to determine what size they are using. Maybe some of our elec tech folks will have some ideas. Doubt a simple VOM would do the job aside from direction. Good Job. Also curious what software you used to generate the graphics. Jack

[Duane Dunn, Allegro]

I was going to use photoshop, then I decided on Viso, but then I decided to go the lazy route.

I just fired up PowerPoint and started drawing lines and boxes. It's an very basic way to draw but it works well. You just layer the objects in and mixing in the text is also easy.

Once I had one slide done I just added a duplicate and modified it for the second picture.

Then a simple select all, copy; then paste into Paint and save as a jpg.

Nothing fancy at all.

I assume it is a diode / resistor similar to the one mentioned here

http://www.lowrance.com/Manuals/Files/M ... 4_add1.pdf

Unfortunately they don't give electrical specs.

They mention a similar setup here in section 2. Sounds like it is to cap the output voltage levels.

http://vancouver-webpages.com/peter/nmeafaq.txt

Comments from any of you EE's?