During our visit to Charleston, we visited the above tree named Angel Oak, a live oak estimated to be around 400 years old. Its circumference is 28 ft and its height is 66 ft. It is a beautiful shady tree and has endured many hurricanes in its long life including the most recent Hurricane Hugo in 1989. Some of its limbs are growing along the ground and from tip to tip, the longest branch distance is 187 ft. It was truly impressive and something we love to compare to our large trees on our property at home.
As we rely on our radar systems to guide us safely at night and in tricky situations with fog and poor visibility, it was worthwhile while in the Bahamas for Mike to try to fix a problem with our 12 kw radar which stopped working properly after a series of tremendous lightning storms in Panama (see blog 10 October 2013 Lightning in the Anchorage). We have two Raymarine radar units on Vanish, a 12 kw long range radar and a 4kw short range radar. Since we didn’t know for sure exactly what had happened to the long range radar, it was difficult to try to locate the problem. The only way to diagnose the problem was through a process of elimination. The easiest test was to buy a replacement cable to see if that was the problem. The radar “talks” with the Raymarine Seatalk system with a simple Ethernet Cat 5 cable. But the cable that Raymarine sells runs the power with the Cat 5 cable in one. I wanted to isolate them both to find out if there was a power issue or an info issue. We bought a 25 ft long Ethernet cable from the hardware store in the Bahamas and plugged one end into the “brain” inside the Radar unit and the other through a hatch and into the Seatalk station on the bridge below. Mike fired up the system and lo and behold, the bar started spinning as it was supposed to.
The next step was to order a whole new cable from Raymarine as the input on the Radar unit has a special plug and we couldn’t just run a cable through the hatch. We ordered a 15 meter cable and tested that through the window as well… and it didn’t work! The radar bar was spinning but no information was being transmitted to the screens. After a few hours on the phone with Raymarine Tech Support, they had no idea what the problem might be so their suggestion was to remove the “brain” from the Radome and bring it to a Raymarine service facility where they could test to see if it was operational. Mike had a feeling that this was not the issue so he worked with the settings in the bridge and got it working! Since the Radar was disconnected, the Raymarine system had “forgotten” about the second radar, so he needed to go in and tell the computer to look for it.
The next problem was to run the cable. It’s only about 12 meters from the Bridge control up to the mast but it is a very difficult 12 meters. He had to remove every other panel from the overhead in the bridge and fish the cable inch by inch. It took a full 8 hour day to run the cable the 12 meters! But now we have a fully functioning long range radar and we didn’t have to ship a 50 lb. computer to Raymarine from the Bahamas. Problem solved and great work by Mike.