Updates on my Drammer 935 yacht: Some electrical repairs & GPS upgrades

We started at 07.00AM and by 10.00AM all 30 boats were back in the water.

BHPian Jeroen recently shared this with other enthusiasts:

I have been doing various jobs on Sirion during the last two weeks. My best friend and spanner mate Peter also joined me for a day of sailing. We took on fresh bunkers. Sirion is all clean again. But I still struggle to get my latest electronic box up and running. It is becoming frustrating, to say the least.

Just to recap what I am trying to do. For all our planning, I used the "waterkaarten-app". A fantastic app that provides all the insights about canals, rivers, bridges, locks and so on. You have seen many screenshots of it on this thread.

I don't use it to navigate with, I use my Raymarine Plotter for that. But I usually have my iPad standing next to my plotter, as it provides me with different information. My iPad has no SIM, which also means it doesn't have a GPS receiver. So to get a location, you need to slave it to your iPhone Hotspot. In itself, that works fine for data. Not so much for position. Because boats move very slowly, the Apple devices don't understand that we are moving. So the position on the iPad always lags considerably behind real-time.

So I bought this clever little box. You plug it into the Raymarine network that connects all my Raymarine devices (Plotter, auto-pilot, depth finder, fish finder, AIS, Radio, GPS etc). This is a standardised network. The converter puts the data out on a WiFi network to the iPad. It should provide me not only with a very accurate position but also full AIS information. Except it does not, as I can't get it to work.

It does connect properly to the network, but it doesn't show up as a WiFi device. And when it does, it won't let you join!

I have spent many hours troubleshooting, all to no avail. It looks as an interference problem.

I moved it all over the boat. even put it outside on the roof. I checked the cables, connectors, tried different cables, and different positions on the network bridge. I got a new device from the supplier, but the problems remain the same.

A couple of days ago, a friend of mine allowed me to plug it into his Raymarine system. And it worked, as advertised, plug and play. So I checked the software versions of his and my system

My software version

My friends software version

So I thought I might have found the issue. My software was not up to date. But when I tried to update the software, it tells me I'm running the latest version already? Some more hours of googling and trawling all over the Raymarine website learned that Raymarine has a very odd way of showing the software versions.

It varies from device, and there is a difference between what they call a software bundle version and individual device software versions.

This is the software running on the Axiom Plotter.

You might recall that last year I had some issues with the plotter and the radar. At that time, we also thought there was some interference problem. We solved it by connecting the radar with a cable to the Axiom plotter. But of course, that did not deal with the interference issues as such. It just meant the radar was not coupled via WiFi.

Even though the radar and the Axiom WiFi is switched of I still see the radar dome as a WiFi source. Now and then, the Axiom shows up as well. Something is amiss!

Anyway, I have spoken to technical Guru Michael of H2O, the company that provided and installed the Raymarine kit. He is baffled as well. So we are going to try and get hold of a Raymarine technician next week!

Yesterday, we had the traditional "boats back into the water" at our marina. The same huge mobile crane, same crane driver and hoist master as when we took the boats out of the water last year end of season. They have been doing this for years.

Sirion is looking good in the early sun!

I happened to come upon this YouTube video. It is two hours long, which admittedly might be a bit long. But it does provide a great overview of the huge diversity in boats, yachts in the Netherlands. Have a look and just skip through it. You will be amazed about how many different boats are floating about!

https://youtu.be/FFLGN7oGi8c?si=dIblm1HTJ3ynBEe9

Getting the boats back into the water goes much faster than lifting them out of course. We started at 07.00AM and by 10.00AM all 30 boats were back in the water. We could have finished at 09.30. But we had one boat that was picked up by trailer and it took about half an hour to get the trailer configured properly and the boat onto it.

Jeroen

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