Bay wandering, navigation annoyances and then some more of them

Lots of navigation kit stuff in here - be warned...

Once again we thought that the poor boat needed a little exertion and so she had the usual run around the bay for a while to warm up all the oily bits and the navigation gear too. Some of the Furuno kit is suffering from the GPS rollover issue where the date it reports goes mad and resets back in time. 

This means that the date / time stamp we are sending out with our AIS position is very wrong although Marine traffic was happy to ignore our time info and just use the "time the message was received" to plot our repetitive track around the bay:

In case you are interested in why there are GPS date issues, have a look at Wikipedia link . The Furuno information on the rollover tells us that we need some firmware upgrades:

(the FA-150 is our AIS device). Annoyingly, the satellite compass and the backup GPS unit both need updates too even though the backup GPS device is only 4 years old. All of them are showing the correct positions but messed up date / time information. That is not the end of the world for us though as our Airmar weather station device also has a GPS function within it. So we are now feeding the date / time into the plotters from the weather station and the position / course made good / speed over the ground from the satellite compass. Getting the Furuno updates completed might be fun as the Maricom folks who really do know about this stuff are rather busy and locally we are short of expertise. A DIY approach is possible but if it goes wrong it can lock up the device for good. Not tempted to try it.....

Then, to add to the fun, the built in navigation PC that had been misbehaving for a while simply refused to boot up. Looks suspiciously like a dead hard disk. Having been through a few issues with it and bearing in mind the age of the thing, we opted not to get a new disk fitted. Instead an old laptop that used to be in service with the Toddlers was rebuilt and loaded up with the Time Zero software. It now has an ethernet link to the main system (using a cable temporarily fed through a hole left by removing a 12v cigarette lighter style charging socket):

This means no redundancy should the main Furuno plotter / radar screen system (the TZT2 kit) fail whereas the old built in PC had lots of individual feeds directly from the GPS, AIS etc:

However, it will do until we get a new purpose built 24v PC and have it configured. Then the charging socket can get refitted.  As a belt and braces backup, just in case the ethernet system goes down and the TZT2 kit with it, we have a little GPS aerial that can be plugged directly into the laptop for position information. We hope never to need it in anger.

For anyone who is really terminally sad, here is the navigation equipment configuration with the built in PC in place:

For everyone else, there are lots of components and wires and they chat in many different languages so they need interpreters but despite all that, generally it works well.